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Trust in our government has lowered to the point that some people are suggesting that the New Orleans jihad massacre was aided and abetted, or even concocted, by the feds in order to stir up unrest as Trump prepares to return to the presidency, or to create a pretext for some other action. Some of those who are making suggestions of this kind, such as Candace Owens, just want to find some plausible way to blame Jews, or to claim that it’s all in the service of trying to get the U.S. involved in a war in the Middle East on behalf of Israel. These types, including Owens herself, tend to downplay or deny outright the reality of Islamic jihad, preferring to see virtually all the workings of the wider world as a puppet show of the all-powerful and ever-unseen Zionists. Still, would the feds really get involved in a jihad plot to kill Americans? Sure.

No one really knows for sure, except the conspirators, if there are any, and whether or not the feds are involved. And jihad is real, as the news out of Africa, Asia and Europe shows daily. Still, the question must be asked: would the feds really aid and abet a jihad terror attack? Have they really become that corrupt and compromised? And the answer is: yes. Of course they would, and yes, they’re that corrupt. The evidence for this fact lies in their behavior at the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest that Pamela Geller and I organized in May 2015.

The Daily Beast wrote in August 2016 about how this undercover FBI agent encouraged the jihadis. The Beast’s Katie Zavadski wrote: “Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. ‘Tear up Texas,’ the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.”

This was not entrapment. Simpson and his partner Nadir Soofiwere determined jihadis who had scouted out other targets. Simpson, along with Soofi and another jihadi, Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, who supplied weapons to the pair and helped train them, sought information about pipe bombs and plotted to attack the Super Bowl, and planned to go to Syria to join the Islamic State (ISIS), long before anyone told him to “tear up Texas.”

But what was the FBI’s game in telling them to do that? Why didn’t they have a phalanx of agents in place, ready to stop the attack? Or did they want the attack to succeed, so that Barack Obama’s vow that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” would be vividly illustrated, and intimidate any other Americans who might be contemplating defending freedom of speech into silence?

We have twice asked the FBI to conduct an investigation into this matter. They ignored us, of course. On Thursday in The Federalist, that publication’s elections correspondent, Brianna Lyman, recalled some of the curiosities of the Garland attack, about which the feds have maintained their silence for nine years now. Lyman wrote: “Radical Islamist terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar plowed his truck through a crowd in New Orleans in the wee hours of New Year’s Day, murdering 15 and injuring dozens. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is now leading the investigation — the same agency in which an agent once encouraged a radical Islamist terrorist to ‘tear up Texas.’”

Lyman noted that “in 2015, local Texas police thwarted what would have been a massive terrorist attack in Garland, Texas. The saga began when the Islamic State recruited Erick Jamal Hendricks, a North Carolina man who later befriended an undercover FBI agent. Hendricks connected the FBI agent to radical Islamist terrorist Elton Simpson.”

Lyman also pointed out that “during initial discussions between Simpson and the undercover FBI agent — who has never been named in government documents — the agent told Simpson to ‘tear up Texas’ after Simpson made the agent aware of an alleged blasphemous Muhammad cartoon contest to be held at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland.” Simpson and Soofi then drove eight hours from Phoenix, Arizona to Garland and opened fire in the parking lot outside our event just as it was ending.

Lyman states: “The FBI agent was present at the attack and later told Hendricks — who was not present at the attack — that he was Hendricks’ ‘eyes’ that day.” Also: “Trenton Roberts, a lawyer for security guard Bruce Joiner (who was injured in the attack), reportedly said he was ‘convinced that there is much more to this story than the FBI has admitted.’”

Oh yeah. No doubt about that. And now the same agency is going to tell us the full truth about what happened in New Orleans. How reassuring.