Sunday, May 02, 2010

T Shirt Vendor Saves Times Square From Terrorist Bomb

Another common man steps out of the crowd to save the day (hat tip:  Theodore's World).  The New York Daily News reports:
The T-shirt vendor - a Vietnam vet - told Officer Wayne Rhatigan there was smoke coming from a Nissan SUV on the southwest corner of 45th St. and Broadway about 7 p.m., sources said.
Rhatigan approached the car, saw the smoke, and sprang into action.
"I did a lap around the vehicle. The inside was smoking," Rhatigan told the Daily News Saturday night. "I smelled gunpowder and knew it might blow. I thought it might blow any second."
He grabbed two rookie female cops patrolling the area. Together, they pushed hundreds of people away from the scene as they called for backup, he said.
The Fire Department and bomb squad rushed to the scene.
What they found was an SUV with two jugs of gasoline and three canisters of propane wired up to a gunpowder charge. The would-be terrorist started the contraption, but it did not explode, only started smoking.  He fled the scene as police arrived and is still at large.

Mark Steyn at the Corner notes that the U.K. Telegraph was the first publication to note the parking place of the SUV:
The dark green Nissan Pathfinder with tinted windows was parked near the junction of 45th Street and Broadway.
The location is also adjacent to the Viacom building, fuelling speculation that it might be linked to the company's controversial South Park cartoon which recently depicted Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit.
So was this latest act of terrorism Islamic in nature? We won't know for sure until the police gather more evidence.  If the perpetrator turns out to be a Muslim, then we will have survived another of many attempts by Muslims to commit domestic terrorism since 9/11.  What should we do about it?

I for one subscribe to the Laurence Auster solution:  stop all Islamic immigration into the west and encourage those already here to leave.

Meanwhile, readers continue to send me their depictions of Islam's bloody prophet, and they will be published en masse on May 20 as planned.

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