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Tuesday’s Attack in New York Is a Reminder that the War on Islamic State Goes On

The recent terrorist attack in Manhattan could easily have been far deadlier, notes Graeme Wood, had the perpetrator followed the guidelines Islamic State (IS) distributed for vehicular rammings. But, Wood writes, it would be unwise to expect other jihadists to be so ineffective:

[A]s long as Islamic State’s attackers are idiots like Sayfullo Saipov, our societies can probably handle them. . . . The Idiots’ Crusade is a manageable problem.

Much less tolerable would be a campaign of competent terror—the kind of mayhem enabled by training, like that of the 2015 Bataclan killers in Paris, or by patient planning, like that done by Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas. There is not much to be done about the idiots, but their idiocy provides a natural limit to the damage they can do. As Islamic State loses territory, the greatest danger remains the prospect that some of the battle-hardened fighters will return home, raising the average IQ of attackers, and making possible attacks that would be many times deadlier than this one.

America’s strategy in Syria is to demolish Islamic State while minimizing the possibility that one of the smart terrorists will slip away. Eight people are dead, tragically, in lower Manhattan. That the number is not higher is a reminder of how important it is that that strategy be pursued with undiminished vigor.

Read more at Atlantic

More about: ISIS, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Security, 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