There’s some ambiguity about whether Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans Jihadist who drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street, was a Muslim convert or not. His brother has said that they were raised Christian, and his ex-wife’s current husband said that Jabbar recently converted.

In reality, it seems that his father converted to Islam, likely for black nationalist reasons, and gave his children Arabic names while also taking the last name Jabbar. It’s unclear exactly when that happened and it seems that the conversion, like a lot of black Muslim conversions back then, might not have had much depth. It’s also possible that it was a conversion to a non-normative black Muslim theology such as the Nation of Islam.

Within the last few years though it appears that Jabbar got serious about Islam.

And so hefilmed videos in which he supposedly expressed a desire to kill his family as “apostates”. Had his family been non-Muslims, he would have called them “infidels.” He called them apostates because he believed they had violated their Islamic fidelity. (ISIS calls a wide range of Muslims apostates. This is why other Muslims hate it. Not because it kills non-Muslims but because it is much more casual about licensing the killing of other Muslims.)

This is an important point that the media is glossing over.

Jabbar wanted to kill his family in the name of Islam.