Chicago, Chicago, That Jihadi Town

Bob and Emily have left and gone away, and Frank Sinatra would find nothing to sing about in Lori Lightfoot’s woke Chicago, a once-great city that is now little more than a pesthole of gang violence, drug abuse, and vaccine tyranny. What’s more, it’s even worse than you think. On Monday, the Justice Department announced that “an Illinois man pleaded guilty today to attempting to provide material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Al-Nusra Front (ANF).” On the same day, another Chicago man was convicted of providing support to ISIS. If this sort of thing keeps up, the skyrocketing crime rate in the Windy City may be the least of Lightfoot’s troubles.

A Chicago man with the fine Midwestern name of Dilshod Khusanov, 36, according to the DOJ, will be deported after he serves a prison term. He “encouraged individuals to travel to Syria to wage violent jihad, or holy war, in 2014 and 2015. For example, on Sept. 28, 2014, Khusanov urged co-conspirator Akmal Zakirov to engage in jihad: ‘I hope that the only [reason] that is preventing you from jihad is some mistakes and flaws that are occurring among the other fighters.’ Khusanov explained that it would be better to help those fighters, rather than criticize them.”

This sturdy Chicagoan was part of a group of jihad plotters inside the United States who raised money to help get ISIS jihadis to the front lines: “Later in 2014, two Brooklyn residents, Abdurasul Juraboev and Akhror Saidakhmetov began planning to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS.” To further this goal, “a group of individuals in a domestic network based in New York and elsewhere, including Khusanov, worked together to raise and contribute money to help fund that trip to Syria.”

The jihadis began discussing ways to finance Saidakhmetov’s trip to Syria; two members of the group “also agreed to solicit money from others to fund Saidakhmetov’s travel.” They were the ones who contacted Khusanov, who then “arranged for money to be deposited in Zakirov’s bank account before Saidakhmetov’s scheduled departure.”

However, all of this came to naught when Saidakhmetov was “arrested in February 2015 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, as he boarded a plane bound for Istanbul, Turkey, a transit point for foreign fighters bound for Syria.”

Meanwhile, another young man in Chicago embraced the light of Islam, and it transformed him. The transformation, however, was for the worse. Thomas Osadzinski, a former student at Chicago’s DePaul University, was also at work aiding ISIS, apparently independently of Khusanov’s cell. According to the Voice of America, he “wrote a computer code to help IS bypass programs designed to block the group’s propaganda.” He exclaimed that he couldn’t just “sit in the chair while Muslims are dying”; he began studying how to make bombs, and spoke about the massacres he would perpetrate “once I get my gun and explosive belt.”

Ultimately, however, the computer science skills he picked up at DePaul led him to put together what he called the “highest form of jihad”: a program that spread ISIS propaganda online. Any dope can blow something up, but Osadzinski boasted: “No more than 10 brothers know how to do this kind of jihad.” He planned to use his computer script to “sort, copy, organize, and redistribute large volumes of content from ISIS official media and other pro-ISIS” Internet outlets.

But it was no big deal. Osadzinski’s attorney, Joshua Herman, minimized the seriousness of his client’s acts, saying, “Liking ISIS is not illegal.” Maybe. And in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, it isn’t even on the radar screen. Her office made no comment about either Khusanov’s guilty plea or Osadzinski’s conviction. If we had any journalists in America today, one of them might ask Lightfoot where Khusanov and Osadzinski went to mosque and if their mosques were under investigation for possible jihad terror preaching. But of course, Lightfoot was not asked that question, and the mosques of these two jihadis are almost certainly not under surveillance.

Meanwhile, there are many more young men much like Dilshod Khusanov and Thomas Osadzinski in Chicago, as well as in other cities all over America. But come on, man! Caring too much about that would be “Islamophobic.”

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.