Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani man and naturalized citizen of the US (as of a year ago), was arrested last night at New York’s Kennedy airport as we was tyring to leave the country. It is being reported that authorities used information from a disposable cell phone to track the suspect and grab him just before he got on a Emirates Airlines flight to Dubai.

While news reports differ, it is likely his final destination was Pakistan, where he had recently been for five months.  The obvious question is whether those five months included terrorist training.

In the hours after the failed bombing, the media and law enforcement officers made two assertions, one of which is now proven false and one which may soon be:

They gleefully foamed at the mouth about the suspect being a white man, with the left hoping beyond hope that the bomber would have been a “right-wing” nut motivated by racism.  (Their speculation was fueled by news reports that a “a white male in his 40s” was videotaped taking off his shirt near the SUV in which the explosives were hidden.)

As if the media weren’t bad enough, Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement on the arrest named Shahzad as “an American citizen” in his second sentence.  (H/T Cory V for directing me to Holder’s statement.) Holder never said (in that statement) that Shahzad was Pakistani or that he had only been an American citizen for a year.  Every time Eric Holder opens his mouth, it becomes clear that he dislikes his country and wants to denegrate it; the apple doesn’t fall far from the boss’ tree.

And as Human Events’ editor Jason Mattera notes, “The NYC Mayor (Michael Bloomberg) told the aging Katie Couric that he’d bet the terrorist suspect was “somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill.”

Prior to the arrest, media parroted law enforcement’s mindless speculation that the bomber was a “lone wolf", i.e. not affiliated with other terrorists or a terrorist organization.  Perhaps they base this on the bomb’s failure to detonate, implying some a lack of sophistication and thus a lack of connection to a group. However, this is the same thing they said about Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber, aka the Panty Bomber, until they learned that he was tied in with Al Qaeda in Yemen.  These guys need to learn to keep their mouths shut until they have something real and relevant to say.

Shahzad could be a “lone wolf", but as I asked on my radio show on Sunday, one day after the failed bombing, when are they going to realize that enough “lone wolves” mean there’s a pack of wolves out to get us?

The failed car bomb was placed outside the offices of Viacom, the home of Comedy Central.  That’s the network which recently ran an episode of South Park which poked fun (in a pretty gentle way, by South Park standards) at Mohammed.  A radical muslim site threatened Comedy Central that they would face retribution if they ran the episode: “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them."  Theo Van Gogh was a Dutch film director who made Submission, a short movie critical of Islam. He was murdered – shot 8 times, stabbed, and nearly beheaded – by a 26-year old man from Morocco on an Amsterdam corner one morning while bicycling to his office. Comedy Central censored most references to Mohammed in the episode and ran it.

So, let’s be clear about this: Sure, there are probably some “white males” with violent, anarchist tendencies.  But our truly existential enemy is radical Islam.  We won’t defeat that enemy until we, including the media, recognize them as such.