Muslim University Student Who Plotted Jihad Massacre is Latest Failure of Officials Who Vet Migrants
By Jihad Watch
The officials who vet migrants are bound as a matter of policy to ignore that there is any such thing as an Islamic jihad, so vetting failures of this kind are bound to happen.
“Egyptian Student Added to CIS National Security Vetting Failures Database,” by Todd Bensman, Center for Immigration Studies, January 10, 2025:
An 18-year-old Egyptian student at Virginia’s George Mason University who now stands charged with multiple terrorism offenses related to a mass casualty plot on Israel’s consulate in New York is the latest addition to the Center for Immigration Studies National Security Vetting Failures Database. The entry brings the total number of analyzed failure cases to 50.
In March 2023, the Center published the database collection to draw “remedial attention” to ongoing government vetting failures lest they “drift from the public mind and interest of lawmakers, oversight committee members, media, and homeland security practitioners who would otherwise feel compelled to demand process reforms”, according to an explanatory Center report titled “Learning from our Mistakes”.
The FBI arrested Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan on December 17, 2024, for allegedly plotting a mass casualty attack on the Israeli consulate in New York. The case is pending in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Hassan, an Egyptian National, entered the United States in July 2022 as a juvenile and lived in Falls Church, Va., although as of January 2025 the visa granted for him to enter had not been publicly reported.
As a juvenile, he may have entered with parents or relatives on a temporary non-immigrant visa, such as a tourist visa or a J-2 student exchange visa, or even on an F-1 student visa, as there is no age limit for student visas. The U.S. State Department would, however, approve any of these visa types and conduct a personal interview of minors older than 14, like Hassan, who was 15 at the time.
However it was that Hassan entered, perhaps even if he illegally crossed a land border and claimed asylum, he was clearly already radicalized as an Islamic extremist, a circumstance that visa adjudicators or even federal law enforcement agents at the border, apparently could have discovered in his online social media accounts.
This is knowable because, within weeks or months of the juvenile Hassan’s 2022 entry, his social media accounts alerted the FBI, which sent agents to interview him “due, in part, to Hassan’s support for ISIS online”, the recent charging documents said.
Although no charges were filed in 2022, at some point soon after the FBI interviews, the U.S. government reportedly decided a mistake had been made. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) put Hassan into deportation proceedings, which were pending by the time he enrolled in George Mason University (GMU) to study information technology, probably in 2023 or 2024.
Hassan was still an enrolled active student in the summer and fall of 2024 when FBI agents were again actively investigating him undercover and saw him on the GMU campus, an agent affidavit said.
Again, Hassan’s online activities on several X social media accounts had drawn FBI attention. The bureau sent in an undercover agent online upon discovering that Hassan, who portrayed himself as an admirer of Osama bin Ladin and ISIS branches in Afghanistan and West Africa, was openly fantasizing about killing infidels and wanted to martyr himself in a mass-casualty attack.
Court documents reveal examples of Hassan’s alleged posts of him musing about killing Jews and, in one case, noted that a football player’s forehead was a “sniper’s dream”.
In one X account, Hassan boastfully shared an AI analysis of his profile that stated: “Based on our AI agent’s analysis of your tweets, you are a young radical Islamist extremist who is obsessed with jihad and violence against perceived enemies. Your tweets suggest a deep-seated hatred and intolerance towards those of other faiths, particularly Jews.”
“Yep I am an extremist,” Hassan later posted….
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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