When Trevor Bickford was 19 years old, on Dec. 31, 2022, he ventured down from his home in Wells, Maine, to Times Square. But he was not planning to join with multitudes of New Year’s Eve revelers. Instead, he attacked three NYPD officers with a machete. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison, and so even if he is on his very best behavior for the next few years, we likely won’t be hearing about him for a while. But his case reveals a massive problem that the whole world seems determined to ignore.
NBC New York reported Thursday that Bickford was sentenced “after pleading guilty to several terror-related charges.” The report noted that Bickford also “previously told the judge he was under psychiatric treatment for schizoaffective disorder.” So did he attack the cops because he was nuts? Not necessarily: Bickford “said he carried out the attack to wage jihad, with the goal of killing military-aged men so he could become a martyr.” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said that Bickford was “inspired by radical Islamic extremism.”
In Jan. 2024, the Associated Press stated that Bickford “shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ — the Arabic phrase for God is great — before striking the officers in the head with the machete and trying to grab an officer’s gun.” This explanation was inaccurate and misleading. “Allahu akbar” doesn’t mean “God is great”; it actually means “Allah is greater.” That is, the god of Islam is superior to anything that non-Muslims worship or hold dear. This declaration of superiority frequently accompanies acts that are designed to enforce the subjugation and submission of the infidel.
That wasn’t all. When Bickford was arrested, he had a handwritten note in his backpack, asking his family to “please repent to Allah and accept Islam.” To his mother, Bickford wrote: “I fear greatly that you will not repent to Allah. And therefore I hold hope in my heart that a piece of you believes so that you may be taken out to [sic] the hellfire.” To his brother, he likewise wrote: “Please repent to Allah and accept Islam. I fear for you.” To another brother in the Marines, he added: “You have joined the ranks of my enemy. And for that I can give you no kind words – return to Allah.”
Faced with all this evidence, authorities had to admit that this was a jihad attack, something they were extremely reluctant to do. Thomas Galati, the NYPD’s chief of intelligence and counterterrorism, epitomized that reluctance in a Jan. 2023 statement that he could barely get out amid all his discomfort with what he had to admit: “Um, y’know, during the attack he did yell out ‘Allah akbar,’ um, you know, and, um, you know, I – I believe he thought that this would be, um, you know, k–, suicide by cop, uh, basically, at the end of this attack. This is a distorted, uh, you know, um, uh, uh, version of him being radicalized and thinking that what he’s doing is right, um, you know, just, uh, want to make sure that that’s clear, he’s not representing, you know, uh, the Islamic religion, but rather, you know, a very, very small percentage of people that get radicalized.”
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It’s good that Galati was finally able to stammer all that out, but it only shines a brighter spotlight on the elephant in the room that no one dares to acknowledge. All right, we get it, Galati: Bickford doesn’t represent Islam, and is only one of “a very, very small percentage of people that get radicalized.” But how did he get “radicalized”? What could have been done to prevent that from happening?
While the NYPD’s chief of intelligence and counterterrorism and the U.S. attorney admit that Bickford was “inspired by radical Islamic extremism,” neither they nor anyone else display even the smallest glimmer of curiosity regarding why exactly so many converts to Islam come to be “inspired by radical Islamic extremism,” or about what could possibly be done in the future to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. They neither know nor care about what causes young Muslims to be “radicalized.” They have no idea what the Qur’an teaches, and they don’t want to get anywhere close to that topic.
The authorities, of course, do not want to appear “Islamophobic.” And so they ensure that we will be seeing many more young men like Trevor Bickford.