Is Islamic Terror America’s Future?
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
If the cliches hold – nothing succeeds like success, the past is prologue – this generation will not likely see an end to the jihadist terror that was on display at Pulse in Orlando on Sunday.
For terrorism has proven to be among the most cost-effective and successful strategies of war that the world has ever seen.
Consider. The 9/11 attacks involved 19 hijackers willing to crash airliners into four buildings: the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the Capitol.
So doing, those 19 altered the foreign policy of the United States.
They drew the world’s last superpower into wars that have bled and almost bankrupted us, broken a president, and left us mired in half a dozen civil and sectarian conflicts with no exit or end in sight.
As a political terrorist, Osama bin Laden rivals Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of the Austrian archduke set in train the events that led to the Great War that brought on the downfall of the West.
Consider the success of Islamist terror since 9/11.
As Gerry Seib of The Wall Street Journal notes, in the 15 years since then, just 95 Americans have died in jihadist attacks in the U.S.
Yet, one atrocity in Orlando, where 49 were slaughtered, polarized the nation, brought the presidential candidates to savaging one another, and held a national TV audience spellbound for a week.
The whole world is talking about Orlando.
And what did this victory cost the Islamic State?
Zero. What Omar Mateen did suicide bombers do every day in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, kill dozens of innocent people while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”
Yet compare the returns from this act of Islamist terror in Orlando, to those from similar attacks in Kabul, Baghdad or Damascus.
Any wonder ISIS would implore its followers to strike where they are, inside the U.S., inside Europe, and not come to Syria to die anonymously?
Under siege in Raqqa, Mosul and Fallujah, being bombed and bled as it surrenders the conquered lands of its caliphate, ISIS’ shift in strategy and targeting makes perfect sense.
Consider, now, the triumphs of Islamist terrorism in Europe.
The 2004 Madrid train bombings led to the defeat of a centrist government and rise of a socialist regime that pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq.
The Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theater strengthened the National Front of Marine Le Pen.
The Beslan massacre of school children in North Ossetia in 2004 led to a consolidation of power by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
Across Europe, the political impact of Islamist terrorism, though the numbers of dead and wounded have been, measured against the casualties of conventional war, relatively few, has been extraordinary.
Islamist terrorism has helped spawn anti-immigrant parties and “illiberal” regimes. The association of Islamic terror with Muslim immigration and refugees from Syria’s war has helped to drive “Brexit,” the British campaign to secede from the EU.
Islamist attacks have helped propel anti-EU movements and to incite nationalist demands for a recapture of state control of borders and security policy from Brussels.
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Source: Is Islamic Terror America’s Future?
