Terror in Austin

National Review Online

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

 

The jihadist whose shooting spree left two dead and 14 wounded at a bar in Austin early on Saturday — a day after American and Israeli forces began the aerial invasion of Iran — left so little to the imagination that, for the most part, we’ve been spared the media self-parody that habitually follows such attacks about how “we may never know the motive.”

 

This gunman had donned an Iranian-flag T-shirt, underneath a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Property of Allah.”

 

The suspect, who was killed in a shoot-out with responding police officers, has been identified as Ndiaga Diagne, 53, a native of the West African nation of Senegal, whose population of about 20 million is nearly all Muslim. In his SUV, he had circled the target location — Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden, a popular spot in Austin nightlife — before opening fire as he drove by, then parking and firing some more.

 

While the investigation is just getting underway, it has been confirmed that Diagne came to the United States in 2000 on a tourist visa but probably did not leave. He is said to have married an American citizen and, on that basis, was permitted to adjust his status to lawful permanent resident alien in 2006. Seven years later, he was naturalized. At the time of Saturday’s murders and attempted massacre, he was residing in Texas after having lived for a time in New York. He reportedly has a minor criminal history — a misdemeanor arrest in 2022 arising out of a car crash — and investigators are looking into past encounters with mental health service providers.

 

The FBI and local police are exploring whether Diagne had connections to overseas terrorist organizations. That is standard practice. That said, Trump administration law enforcement and security officials must resist the word games by which the government denies that a patent terrorist attack is a terrorist attack. Under these contortions, there is no terrorism unless a nexus can be established between the murderer and some foreign entity that the government has designated a terrorist group — say, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or ISIS.

 

Such legerdemain obscures the threat to Americans, which is fueled by a virulent ideology — sharia supremacism, the belief that societies must be coerced into accepting a harsh interpretation of Islamic law. The challenge is to marginalize this alien, anti-American, anti-Western, and antisemitic ideology, not merely oppose the organizations it has spawned.

 

Policymakers resist focusing on the ideology because it is rooted in a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, one that is prevalent, if not dominant, in many Muslim-majority countries. Government officials rationalize that any set of ideas, taken to an extreme, can be dangerous and trigger violence. Hence the Obama and Biden administrations’ transmogrification of counterterrorism into “violent extremism” and the FBI’s sometimes tragicomic inability to describe terrorism as terrorism.

 

This consciously avoids the stubborn fact that jihadist terrorism is a uniquely pernicious global force. Our solemn commitment to religious liberty need not blind us to the threats animated by a forcible movement — not a religion but a political ideology masquerading as religion — that strikes viciously against all who oppose its totalitarian aims, very much including Muslims.

 

Sharia supremacism rejects our constitutional principles of individual liberty, equality, and antidiscrimination, as well as the peaceful resolution of policy disputes. A clear-eyed grasp of it would make it painfully apparent that would-be immigrants who adhere to the ideology will refuse to assimilate in our pluralistic society. Beyond that, some percentage of them will carry out violent attacks. That percentage, thankfully, is small, but the death and destruction they cause is outsized.

 

The Austin investigation is in its early phase. Our experience of jihadist violence, however, is decades old. The time to incorporate a focus on sharia supremacist ideology in law enforcement and intelligence investigations, and in immigration policy, is overdue.