Pickerington North High SchoolAn Ohio school was placed on lockdown this week after it received a call from a man with a "heavy accent" who threatened to kill the children in response to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The Washington Free Beacon is reporting that all schools in Pickerington, Ohio were placed on lock down on Wednesday after a man phoned the Pickerington North High School and threatened to murder students with an AK-47.
“The school received a call [at around 11:15 a.m.] from a male with a heavy accent and he indicated that he was going to attack Pickerington North due to attacks on Israel and was going to kill the kids and that he had an AK-47 gun,” said Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalen.
“He identified himself as ‘Mohammed Shehad,’" or something similar to that, and claimed to live in the area.
“My sense is that due to the way he identified himself it sounds like he was upset at Israel,” the Sheriff said, although no one knows what his exact motivations were at the time.
Area schools were placed on “exterior lockdown” as a precautionary measure.
School resumed yesterday with an officer assigned to the High School and additional deputies dispersed throughout the area.
An investigation is currently underway to determine the identity of the individual.
“We have detectives assigned to that; they’re working on trying to trace the phone number and identify the suspect,” Phalen said.
Patrick Poole, a terrorism analyst who lives in the area, told the Beacon about a growing problem in the Columbus area regarding an active al-Qaeda cell in the area.
“We have had a growing problem here in the Columbus area for years that local law enforcement and the media want to continue to sweep under the carpet,” Poole said.
“Not only has Central Ohio been the home of the largest known al-Qaeda cell since 9/11—with several members currently in prison on terrorism charges and at least two deported—we’ve had a number of cases of homegrown jihadists come through town, including al-Shabaab rapper Omar al-Hammami and Little Rock Army recruiting station killer Carlos Bledsoe.”
Poole continued: “An al-Shabaab recruiter and fundraiser from the area was killed in a firefight in Mogadishu in 2010, and we know of several cases of young men who have left from Columbus to join the Somali terrorist group. One of the original online jihadist forum operators, Sarfaraz Jamal, grew up in the area and initially ran his operation from his Worthington home.”
Meanwhile, locals such as Eric Pennington, whose daughter attends Pickerington High, said he was shocked when his daughter told him what happened.
“My daughter texted me late morning saying they were in lockdown,” Pennington said. “She got home and started saying this guy may be Arabic and was threatening to shoot us because he was mad at Israel and what was happening in Gaza. I’ll confess, I thought, that can’t be right.”
Unfortunately, she was right, and it's indicative of the activities of jihadists that is taking place all over the United States but rarely reported in the news.
This article, appearing on the PJMedia website, documents 10 recent acts of Jihad in America that most Americans never heard about.
For instance, one incident involved a Seattle Muslim who was recently jailed for the murder of four Americans which he killed because he was "on a jihad against Americans."
Another incident involved a man named Ahmed Abassi who was caught plotting to commit acts of terror in the U.S., such as derailing an Amtrak train, and to plotting to release bacteria in the air or water that would have killed up to 100,000 people. Abassi escaped a sentence of 50 years in hail by pleading guilty to a lesser charge which could soon see him out of jail and back on the streets.
As Spencer warns, and the Pickerington school incident proves, "Incidents like this will one day, not too long from now, be a more or less daily occurrence in the United States. You can’t say you weren’t warned."
© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace® http://www.womenofgrace.com
