Rep. Pete King said Thursday he doesn't understand why the FBI and law enforcement official's aren't calling Monday's Ohio State University attack terrorism at this point.
"It makes no sense," the New York Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program. "If this isn't terrorism, I don't know what is. I suppose there is always a remote chance it is not. But by any logical mind this is terrorism."
On Monday, Somali-born OSU student, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, was shot and killed after he drove over a curb at the college before jumping out to stab bystanders.
Angela Byers, an FBI agent leading the investigation, said the agency only believes he may have been inspired by ISIS and Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric and al-Qaida leader who was killed in 2011.
The FBI is also trying to verify whether messages on Facebook about U.S. interference in Muslim countries were posted by Artan.
"He made Islamist rants in the past," King said on Thursday. "The method he used, using a vehicle to plow into people, using a knife. This is the new face of terrorism. He doesn't have to have a direct link to ISIS. ISIS is reaching out to the people who are unstable. I don't know why the FBI Is going through all these contortions to say there is not enough evidence to say it's terrorism . . terrorism and it's weird."
Meanwhile, the Obama administration "didn't hesitate to send representatives to Michael Brown's funeral implying that was some racist killing by the police officer even though it turned out that the officer was 100 percent correct and Michael Brown was a common criminal," King said.
King said he hopes Americans never take such activities for granted, but he fears that will happen "partly because of the mainstream media and partly because of the Obama administration that tries to gloss over these."
Artan's action, he continued, was "the same thing that was done to the British soldier in London when he was attacked with a knife and beheaded. This is classic terrorist behavior and the fact that he has Islamist rants, you put that together and it is terrorism."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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