Is the U.S Ready for a Major Jihad Attack?

As the world reels from recent terror attacks, questions loom over America’s readiness to thwart potential jihadist threats.

By Robert Spencer, Front Page Magazine

What’s coming is as plain as day.

Our nation can hardly be said to have a southern border at all anymore. Even if the border were magically to reappear tomorrow, millions of people are already in the country without anyone knowing who or what they are. One hundred sixty-nine people on the FBI’s terror watch list were caught at the border in 2023; nobody knows how many people on that watch list got across the nonexistent border without being caught.

Four jihadis just murdered at least 137 people in Moscow. They held the same beliefs as the Hamas jihadis who murdered 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7. How many people are in this country right now who aspire to be the next jihad warrior? How many people are planning to become the next “martyr” and lay hold of the Qur’an’s promise of a place in paradise for those who “kill and are killed” for Allah?

No one knows, and even asking such questions is not allowed. Just last week, all of America’s many intelligence agencies received instructions to avoid using terms such as “jihadist” so as to avoid committing the cardinal sin of “Islamophobia.” Jihadists can quote the Qur’an and invoke Islamic teaching all day long, but our intelligence and law enforcement officials are not allowed to notice, or to study their motives and goals, for such study would lead them inexorably into the examination of Islam.

This means that the people whose job it is to protect us from these jihad terrorists are bound as a matter of government policy not to know or understand the motives and goals of those terrorists whom they are trying to foil. Courting Muslim votes by tiptoeing around the reality of the jihad threat is more important to our elected and appointed officials than stopping the next Islamic jihad attack.

So what is to be done? Well, we can vote the bums out, but even if we do, all too many Republicans are just as squeamish as Democrats about incurring charges of “Islamophobia,” which can be a career killer even in these post-Oct. 7, post-Moscow, post-44,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11 days. What’s more, cleaning up the desperately corrupt FBI and the entire rotten intelligence apparatus is not going to be done in a day, no matter who emerges victorious in November.

No, our defense against the next jihad terror massacre in the United States is up to us, and to us alone. The military is preoccupied with studying Critical Race Theory and going to drag shows; it isn’t going to save us. The police, understaffed, underfunded, and on the defensive nationwide ever since a career criminal died of a drug overdose while in the process of being apprehended, aren’t going to save us. Everyone knows now that the feckless and politicized FBI certainly isn’t going to save us.

One thing that distinguishes America from Russia and Western Europe is that we still respect the right to self-defense. After 9/11, alert citizens foiled major jihad attacks (including the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber, who have left their mark on airport security to this day). Only Americans who are likewise alert and aware can take lawful steps to stop jihadis in their tracks, and they may be the only line of defense between those jihadis and large crowds of unaware, defenseless human beings. Of course, we are dealing with terrorists, and part of the terror that they try to instill in us stems from our not knowing or being able to know when, or how, they might strike. It could happen anywhere, at anytime, to anyone. That, however, simply makes it all the more incumbent upon each of us to keep our eyes open.

The threat we face is also a call to Americans to rediscover our spiritual wellsprings, and to understand that no one lives forever, but that to stand against evil, even if it means dying, is a prerequisite for maintaining a free society. To die with courage is a thousand times better than to live with cowardice.

But this is not a call to die. It is a call to live, to recognize what is coming, to assess our situation realistically, and to plan accordingly. For too long, Americans have been passively trusting in our institutions, secure in the knowledge that the police, and the military, and our elected officials were on the job and had our best interests at heart.

Those days are over. Nevertheless, the jihadis have not won. The left has not won. The socialist internationalist tide that has swept away so much of what we used to take for granted as Americans could still be turned back. But that is up to us. Each of us must decide, as surely as God offered the choice to the Israelites: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Jihadis love to proclaim how much they “love death.” Let us in turn love life all the more, and stand to counter them and their inhuman totalitarian leftist allies, secure in the knowledge that in the end, life conquers death.