by Martin Cothran
Earlier this week, the entire Los Angeles Unified School District shut down today because of an e-mail terrorism threat from someone who claimed to represent a group of jihadists. But New York schools received the same threat and considered it a hoax.
Why? Because of a spelling error.
Here is NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, explaining one of the reasons New York decided not to close its schools:
Bratton said one reason authorities believed the email was a hoax was because the word Allah was not capitalized: “The language in the email would lead us to believe that this is not a jihadist initiative… That would be incredible to think that any jihadist would not spell Allah with a capital ‘A.'”
So the literate police in New York noticed something that the apparently semi-literate educators in L.A. missed, causing them to lose a whole school day.