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The Myth of the “Lone Wolf” Persists

Shortly after the recent terrorist attack in New York City, Governor Cuomo referred to its perpetrator as a “lone wolf,” a term frequently invoked after such incidents. Frederick W. Kagan finds the phrase “profoundly misleading,” not least because police have already been searching for an accomplice:

[One] impetus behind this now almost-instinctive denial of foreign terror connections comes from the Obama administration’s intensive efforts to sustain the notion that it had defeated al-Qaeda long after it had become apparent to careful analysts that this was not the case. This effort spawned the popular “lone-wolf” thesis. . . .

This matters because Americans must change the way they understand the terrorist threat at home. There will be an increasing number of people radicalized within the U.S., conducting attacks that are not directly ordered or controlled from overseas.

Eliminating terrorist safe havens in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sahel [region of Africa] will not end the problem of domestic terrorism. But allowing them to continue to flourish will unquestionably make it much worse. Safe havens give groups places to develop and transmit the messages that radicalize people in the West, as well as to perfect and propagate methods of carrying out attacks. They are, above all, evidence to those who seek it that these groups and their ideas can win.

The anti-terror strategy we’ve been following for a decade—and which the current administration is largely continuing—is failing and must be replaced. Rather than dismissing the most recent attack as yet another “self-radicalized lone wolf,” and thereby separating it from the global Salafist-jihadist problem, let’s take it as a call to reevaluate our overall approach to the problem and find more successful ways to ensure the security of the American people.

Read more at AEI

More about: Barack Obama, ISIS, Jihadism, Politics & Current Affairs, War on Terror

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic