The man arrested in the murder of 10 whites at a grocery in Boulder, Colorado, on Tuesday is not an “angry white male” as Twitter leftists immediately claimed, but instead an angry, out-of-control immigrant from Syria with whom the FBI was familiar.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 21, was born in Raqqa in 1999 and came here with 11 siblings.
He was, the Washington Post reported, a “a moon-faced boy who wrestled but perhaps wanted for friends.”
Maybe, but 10 Americans would still be alive if the “moon-faced boy” had stayed where he belonged: at home, in Syria.
“Chill Kid”
He was a “pretty chill kid,” a schoolmate told the Post for its obligatory post-murder, what-makes-this-guy-tick profile. But “that mild persona soon unraveled.”
In November 2017 during his senior year, he attacked a kid in class, the Post reported:
He stood up in class and assaulted an unsuspecting student, pummeling him in the head and face for an alleged ethnic slur. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to probation and community service.
He treated his wrestling teammates to more unhinged behavior after they lost a match. “He got super mad and started throwing his head gear. He was saying, ‘I’m going to kill you guys’ and walked out,” Angel Hernandez told the Post:
His teammates were stunned.
“We were kind of quiet about it. We kind of went ahead and went along with practice. Coach was like, ‘What the heck just happened?’” Hernandez said.
Alissa never returned to the team.
The New York Times reported that “fellow students recall him as having a fierce temper that would flare in response to setbacks or slights,” and picked up a detail his brother offered to the Daily Beast:
[He] was paranoid [and] would talk about “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”
“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” he said.
He said he was sure the shooting was “not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness.”
“The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school. He was like an outgoing kid, but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social,” the brother said.
The Times also revealed that the FBI knew about him because he was “linked to another individual” the bureau was investigating.
It Was a White Guy … Not
Almost immediately, leftists on Twitter tried to blame a “white guy” for the murder.
One of them was Vice President Kamala Harris’ niece in a since-deleted tweet. “The Atlanta shooting was not even a week ago,” she tweeted. “Violent white men are the greatest threat to the country.”
“I’ll bet anyone my salary right now that the shooter in Boulder is a right wing, MAGA, white male,” another wrote about four hours later.
“Any time you hear of a mass or spree shooting, it’s reasonable to assume it’s a white male,” tweeted a third. “The exceptions are rare.”
In fact, exceptions aren’t “rare,” as the Times reported in 2016 when it examined 358 mass shootings. That aside, Tuesday’s massacre at the King Soopers in Boulder wasn’t the first mass or multiple murder by a Muslim immigrant.
In 2015, a Muslim immigrant from Kuwait, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, attacked U.S. military facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The Tsarnaev brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013 were Muslims born in Chechnya.
In 2007, Sulejman Talović murdered six people in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was a Muslim born in Bosnia.
