The New Jihadists Are Our Kids

“I will use my knives and machete to slit their throats and kill them."

Coeur d’Alene, an Idaho city with a population of over 50,000, had too many churches. Alexander Scott Mercurio, a new teen convert to Islam, had a plan to “fix that real soon.”

Ramadan was almost over and Mercurio was unhappy because he believed that he was a bad Muslim who hadn’t even assaulted, let alone killed any Christians, and would go to hell.

“I am a hypocrite who has not even spat in the face of a kafir (non-Muslim),” he complained in online chats. “Let alone spilled their blood and induced terror into their hearts and minds.”

Mercurio wasn’t sure if he could be considered a good Muslim without killing Christians.

“I really don’t want to miss out on the opportunity for jihad in Ramadan,” he worried.

While the bloody Islamic holiday of Ramadan is often used as a pretext to warn America, Israel and other countries to stop fighting Islamic terrorists lest it offend Muslims, it’s actually a time of redoubled terrorism. And Mercurio wanted to get in on that murderous spiritual opportunity.

“I’ve been thinking about Jihad. Well, I always am, but I mean it’s Ramadan,” Mercurio agonized. “I have motivation for nothing but fighting, like some kind of insatiable bloodlust for the life juice of these idolaters, a craving for mayhem and murder to terrorize those around me… primarily against churches.”

There are “three or five churches within walking distance of me” who would be objects of his “insatiable bloodlust: for the blood of non-Muslims.

Mercurio decided that he would strike on “the last few days of Ramadan, probably on Sunday, their special day.”

The special day was April 7th also known as the Octave Day of Easter or the Sunday of Divine Mercy and would have been well known to the Muslim convert who was raised as a Christian by his parents. But Islam has no mercy, certainly not divine and not human either, and neither did Mercurio who fantasized about massacring Christians on “their special day” of mercy.

Alexander Scott Mercurio had started out as a white supremacist before converting to Islam at the age of seventeen. He took on a user name meaning ‘total submission’ in Russian (because of his Russian immigrant mother) and whined about North Idaho and his “very Christian and conservative parents” who “want me to stop being Muslim” while he fantasized about building weapons that would allow him to “heap massacres upon the kuffar (non-Muslims) daily”.

The Muslim convert had been allegedly working on sending cryptocurrency donations to ISIS while taking part in an online group that attacked the Taliban for not being murderous enough.

Mercurio had allegedly begun chatting with a Muslim terrorist in Gaza who was moving money to ISIS, but then his pal, whom the FBI only says was “believed to have died”, presumably in fighting with Israel, went offline and an informant took over the account and became the receptacle for the convert’s fantasies about killing all the Christians.

“Walk to the nearest Church. Stop close by the church, equip the weapon(s) and storm the temple, kill as many as possible…. then burn the temple to the ground, flee the scene, then move onto the next church, rinse and repeat for all 21+ churches in the town until killed.”

Later the Muslim convert elaborated that he would “walk into a church and then start beating people with the ‘baton’; hit them first on the kneecaps and elbows… I will beat them only to incapacitate them, I will use my knives and machete to slit their throats and kill them.”

Then he would set the church on fire.

While Mercurio searched for knives and axes, he really needed something more powerful. After exploring the possibility of building some sort of flamethrower, he decided to get his dad’s guns. Initially he thought about killing or beating his father over the head with a pipe to get the key to the gun safe, and then decided he could just break in and grab the guns while his dad was out.

Mercurio got his ISIS flag, developed his plans and finalized a script for his ‘martyrdom’ video which included responding to the call of the Islamic State by “killing Jews and Christians” and “his message to the disbelievers to go to hell”.

But his plan to massacre churchgoers with guns, knives and fire ended when he was busted.

What had worried Mercurio most of all was not being caught, but having his act of Islamic terror misrepresented by the media. He was concerned that they would “slander me in the media and call me a mentally ill psycho who did this out of desperation and not as an act of religiously motivated terrorism.”

It will be easy for the media to dismiss Alexander Scott Mercurio as a teen who fantasized about killing people, and if he hadn’t done it for Islam, would have done it as a Neo-Nazi or just a random school shooter. And yet the documents released show that he agonized about trying to be a good Muslim. Failing at other traditional Islamic practices and prone to lapsing into pornography, he found the traditional Islamic loophole to get into ‘paradise’ through murder.

Mercurio is one of a growing number of American teens who convert to Islam, often in out-of-the-way places and then get involved in Islamic terrorism. Recent cases include Trevor Bickford, 19, of Maine, who tried to attack NYPD officers in Times Square with a Machete, Xavier Pelkey, 18, also of Maine, who tried to recruit two teens for a terrorist attack in Chicago, Cole James Bridges from Akron, Ohio, Mateo Ventura, a high school student in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and Jonathan Xie, a 20-year-old from a New Jersey suburb.

There is a pattern of teenage boys, resentful of their parents and society, with nothing to aspire to and nothing to believe in, drifting into fantasies of violently terrorizing everyone around them.

Islam, like Neo-Nazism, gave Alexander Scott Mercurio something to believe in and kill for.

“I will not live to see the day that the flag of Tawheed (Islam) flutters over every land, nor the day that the entire Earth is governed by the Sharia of Allah,” he wrote. “I will gladly spill my blood again and again to make that a reality.”

Both Islam and Neo-Nazism offered and offer young men the opportunity to kill and then die for a glorious cause, destroying everything around them so that a new dark order will rule the earth.

This primal evil impulse at the heart of Nazism, Communism, Islam and so many other evils is a perversion of the good impulse to build, uphold and to protect that America once used to offer.

Troubled young men seeking direction used to join the military, but now they find only wokeness there. The culture banishes young men, telling them they suffer from toxic masculinity and they drift into movements like those run by Muslim convert and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate or into Islam itself which preaches they can find meaning by killing Christians.

America needs to do more than spy on these young men, it needs to give them something to fight for. Because if it does not, Islam will. And they will become agents of our ancient enemy to kill, burn and bring down America, Europe and the entire civilized world under the flag of Islam.

[The full story of the Democratic plot to rig the 1864 election is told in the final chapter of my book, ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’.]