There is a strong possibility that he was a convert to Islam.
“Ismail,” the other son of Abraham, is said by the Bible to be the progenitor of the nomadic Arabs.
But according to Islam, Ismail was the son Allah chose to be his prophet, not Isaac.
Ismail is the way it is spelled by Muslims.
Ax suggests a weapon used to destroy, perhaps to destroy idolatry. It also occurs to me that it sounds like “Ismail X,” which would be a typical Black Muslim name.
No, we don’t know for sure that he was a Jihadi. But everything is consistent with it, including the evident premeditation in these mass killings. Maybe he was insane, but this was not a sudden outburst of insanity. It was planned. He bought the guns weeks earlier, and he had the necessary green card to do it, not a student visa. He had the lock and chain so he could bar the door to the building. And many other indications of deliberate planning.
I, too, would like to see the full note. But the ATF and the FBI have consistently covered up all instances of domestic Muslim terrorism, and I would be astounded if they did anything else in this instance. There have been a large number of cases of “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” in the US. But few people know about that, because the authorities and media have buried the details. They wouldn’t want to scare us or risk the possibility that people might get a bit . . . Islamophobic.
So, maybe he was nuts, maybe he was drug ridden, but I suspect he was also acting out the usual Muslim fantasies.
Ismail is also a computer programming thing. My techie son tried to explain it to me, but it went over my head. He also said Ax is a gamer tag. Maybe our trusty researchers here can find more.
Another meaning of “Ishmael” is “social outcast” according to my dictionary.