I’m sitting at my desk today when a peer of mine comes up and says to me, “Did you hear that someone tried to blow up the mall?” At first I thought they where kidding or had some misinformation. There is no way that anyone would want to blow up Cherryvale Mall. Well apparently Derrick Shareef (AKA Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef) wanted to. That’s right, someone was planning on doing a “terrorist attack” in order to “commit acts of violent jihad against targets in the United States as well as commit other crimes in order to obtain funds to further his goals of violent jihad.” Plus he had other ideas.

Now of course this guy didn’t think things through too well. His weapons of choice where two handguns and four hand grenades he was going to put into trashcans located around the mall. Now I don’t have any first hand functional working knowledge of a hand grenade, but unless I’m completely wrong this is an anti-personal device. There isn’t a lot of explosive power; it just sends shrapnel in every direction trying to kill anything living in its “danger zone”. Thus putting these grenades into the cement containers is not going to have the desired effect this guy is thinking of. If I’m mistaken, please let me know.

Plus the guy thought he could get four grenades and two handguns for a set of stereo speakers. Those have got to be some extremely nice speakers. The last time I checked hard to find items such as grenades donÂ’t come cheap. If I found a guy that was willing to part with four of them AND two handguns for a set of speakers, I would be thinking Fed. Especially if they set up the trade for the parking lot of a Walmart. Then again when you are blinded by your hatred of the country you are in, I guess you arenÂ’t thinking too clearly.

Finally, Why Cherryvale Mall? Sure, initially he was looking at government buildings in Rockford and Dekalb, but he ultimately decided on the mall. Within an hour and a half are two larger malls in a more populated area. I would think either Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg or Gurnee Mills mall in Gurnee would be better targets. Cherryvale Mall isnÂ’t that large of a mall. Even in the Christmas greed season when itÂ’s busiest, I still think itÂ’s less busy then those other two. If you were going to go Jihad on Northern Illinois, IÂ’d think youÂ’d want to get the most targets at the same time. IE would 9-11 have been anywhere near as tragic if the planes crashed into a K-mart?

But what really gets my dander up over this whole thing is that the AP press is saying it was a Chicago area mall. Hey numbnuts, grab a farking map and look. Cherry Valley is a good 90 miles from Chicago. Hell, itÂ’s roughly 40 minutes of farmland before you get to the nearest city that could be considered a suburb of Chicago. Sure maybe not everyone knows where Cherry Valley or even Rockford is, but damn I didnÂ’t know that giving generalized areaÂ’s of where something newsworthy happens is good reporting.

Either way they caught the guy before he did any harm. Would I call him a terrorist, okay in the loosest sense of the word, but he seems to be more of a raving lunatic.

Posted by: Contagion at 05:35 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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