Estaban Santiago, an immigrant from the US territory of Puerto Rico, took a flight from his home in Anchorage, Alaska aboard Air Canada. When the plane touched down at its destination in Fort Lauderdale he claimed his bags, which included a checked gun. He walked into the rest room and loaded a clip. When he emerged he opened fire without saying a word, wounding 13 and killing 5.
Like Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hassan, Santiago is a strange cocktail of military service, psychiatric instability and fixation with radical Islamic ideology. Like with Nidal Hassan there were warning signs, ignored by authorities perhaps fearing political correctness or, in this case, dismissing the incongruency of a hispanic ISIS militant. There was a borderline schizophrenic instability to Santiago. A man at war with himself to some degree. Months before the attack he turned himself in to the FBI office in Anchorage claiming that he had been “forced to fight for ISIS”, “”forced to watch their videos”. This was likely the last great gasp of caution from whatever self-critical conscience still existed within his mind. Santiago’s metaphorical war within ran deep. He recently became a father, but was himself the subject of a child pornography investigation.
There is evidence that Santiago’s broken mind was compromised by Radical Islam. He lived mere blocks from the Islamic Community Center Anchorage, the only mosque in Alaska. One of his online pseudonyms, Naota33 was discovered trying to download jihadi propaganda on a site frequented by firearm and explosives enthusiasts. He’s also been pictured giving an index finger salute popular among ISIS militants (pictured above) which refers to tawhid or ‘the belief in the oneness of God’. The garment he wears around his neck is a keffiyeh, worn in the Middle East to avoid sandstorms. It has become popular among some US soldiers stationed in the Middle East but it is also a sign of identification with Middle Eastern culture and a popular Islamist fashion accessory.
Going forward, authorities have to take it very seriously when a mentally unstable young man begins to talk about radical Islam. The nature of the ISIS threat is that it exists online where it may worm it’s way into the minds of the most frustrated and demented members of Western society: the second generation Muslim immigrant seething that he has been transplanted into a culture where he doesn’t belong, the sociopathic or schizophrenic paranoid who seeks a justification to lash out at The West, and now twice, the battle-scarred Islamic military veteran torn by divided loyalty.
Authorities closed their file on Santiago once he had been admitted for psychiatric treatment. He claimed that he “didn’t want to hurt anyone”. But it seems that authorities have underestimated the insidious appeal of militant Islam on those disaffected with The West. Like Black Lives Matter, militant Islam exists as a call to action for the violent rage some minorities feel towards the white majority. This is the so-called “self-radicalization” phenomenon which works exactly as intended by the militant mollahs. They claim credit for another blow against America while their liberal apologists in the Democratic Party chalk it up to mental illness, failing to recognize how such deranged individuals are specifically preyed upon and pushed over the edge by the cult of radical Islam.
