[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
On December 13 at Brown University, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente shot dead two students and wounded nine others. While police mounted a search, the shooter moved on to MIT where he murdered professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro. As Scott Johnson notes at Powerline, Neves Valente attended the same academic program as Loureiro from 1995-2000 and also attended Brown in the 2000-2001 school year, but here’s more to him. “Valente was a beneficiary of our insane diversity visa program. The murderer was issued a diversity visa in 2017 and became a legal permanent resident of the United States that year.” That recalls a similar case deadly consequences.
In 2010, Uzbek Muslim Sayfullo Saipov (pictured above) came to the United States on a diversity immigrant visa, from the green card lottery program. On October 31, 2017 in Manhattan, Saipov murdered eight people by running over them with a rented truck. As the Department of Justice explained:
Saipov planned to use the truck to strike pedestrians in the vicinity of the West Side Highway and then proceed to the Brooklyn Bridge to continue to strike pedestrians. Saipov wanted to kill as many people as he could. Saipov chose Oct. 31, Halloween, for the attack because he believed there would be more civilians on the street for the holiday.
Saipov wanted to display ISIS flags in the front and back of the truck during the attack, but decided against it because he did not want to draw attention to himself. Saipov requested to display ISIS’s flag in his hospital room and stated that he felt good about what he had done.
Moments after Saipov got out of the truck, he yelled, in substance and in part, “Allahu Akbar.”
The diversity visa terrorist killed Daren Drake, Nicholas Cleves, and Anne-Laure Decadt, a Belgian national and mother of two. Three Belgians were among the 12 wounded by Saipov. The Uzbek Muslim also killed Argentine nationals Diego Enrique Angelini, Ariel Erlij, Hernán Ferruchi, Hernan Diego Mendoza and Alejandro Damián Pagnucco. They were celebrating the 30th anniversary of their graduation from a technical school in Rosario. Saipov missed their classmate Ariel Benvenuto by less than a foot, and he broke the sad news to folks at home.
The president at the time of Saipov’s entry in 2010 tweeted “Michelle and I are thinking of the victims of today’s attack in NYC and everyone who keeps us safe. New Yorkers are as tough as they come.” The composite character, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, failed to name Saipov or condemn the mass murder as an act of Islamic terrorism. That followed his pattern at Fort Hood in 2009 (“workplace violence”), the Boston Marathon in 2013, San Bernardino in 2015, and Orlando in 2016, all with massive loss of life.
President Trump, urged the death penalty for Saipov and called for “terminating the diversity lottery program.” Saipov’s lawyers said Trump’s call for the death penalty was “based on nothing more than an intemperate assessment of his crime and his identity as an Uzbek Muslim immigrant who was a diversity visa lottery winner.”
In court, Saipov “recited a history of Islam going back to its inception” and said the tears of the victims’ families would fill “maybe one handkerchief” while the courtroom “would be filled up with the tears and blood of the Muslim population.” Monica Missio, mother of victim Nicholas Cleves, called Saipov” the very worst of humanity and an unfortunate waste of space.”
Manhattan federal Judge Vernon Broderick said Saipov’s conduct was among the worst he’d ever seen “in terms of the impact it had on the victims and the sheer unrepentant nature of the defendant.” Broderick told Saipov, “the eight people you murdered in cold blood were living their best lives. You snatched their lives from them.”
On January 26, 2023, a jury convicted Saipov of all 28 counts in the indictment including “murder for the purpose of gaining entrance to a racketeering enterprise (ISIS).” On March 13, 2023, the same jury failed to reach a verdict on the death penalty, so the mass murderer gets eight life sentences plus 260 years.
This is what happens with a visa program established “to ensure a greater number of DVs are allocated to aliens from countries and regions with lower immigration rates to the United States.” When it emerged that murderer Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered on a diversity visa, President Trump ordered the program paused. Congress would be wise to eliminate it completely, as a matter of public safety, national security and common sense. A state lottery functions as a tax on stupidity. The visa lottery functions as a travel agency for terrorists.
The Brown-MIT murderer killed himself but Sayfullo Saipov lives on in federal prison at the expense of American taxpayers. The Uzbek Muslim has kept rather quiet, unlike the Fort Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan, sentenced to death in 2013.
In 2021, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan prompted Hasan to proclaim “We have won! All praises be to all-mighty Allah!” and so on. In September, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said he was “100 percent committed” to the death sentence of this “savage terrorist.” At this writing the “soldier of Allah” remains alive, and his long overdue execution would not end the story.
The FBI knew Hasan was communicating with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki about killing Americans. Someone in the FBI’s Washington office called off the surveillance and the bureau did nothing to prevent Hasan from murdering 13 Americans – 14 counting the unborn child of Pvt Francheska Velez.
As a matter of justice, FBI director Kash Patel must now reveal which FBI official called off the surveillance on the soldier of Allah. The people will be watching.
