Excerpt:
A misleading and dangerous narrative has formed in the wake of the shooting in Garland, Texas that is music to the ears of Islamists: That there's a causal relationship between the Mohammed drawing event and the attack on the event. Many figures in the media are conflating the target with the motivation.
The facts speak for themselves. The first perpetrator who was identified, Elton Simpson, was first investigated by the FBI all the way back in the fall of 2006. The court documents show that the FBI was tracking a suspected plot to establish a sleeper cell in Arizona and Simpson was associated with the organizer. The FBI used a presumably Muslim informant who attended Simpson's mosque.
Simpson was recorded telling the informant about his desire to quickly enter Paradise by dying in violent jihad. He blasted Muslims who didn't believe they are required to fight overseas and framed the conflict as one between democracy's "man-made laws" and "Allah's laws." He talked about the need to rebuild a caliphate. All of this happened roughly eight years before ISIS made "caliphate" practically a household word and before the Mohammed drawings contest was ever mentioned.