we re now 15 years behind 9/11. i think it s fair to say that even while al qaeda central and even isis has been losing ground that the jihadi enterprise is alive and sadly and tragically well. so it s okay to come to terms with the problem. the issue is how you talk about it, how you talk about and the importance of enlisting muslims. certainly the 1% of our fellow citizens who are muslims in this country. making sure you use the right vocabulary and formulations to recruit them. in this war, and it is a war, finally there is a risk in creating the notion that this is somehow a civilizational war, that this is a war between the forces of christianity and judaism and the west against islam. in large part, a civilizational
tweet that you mentioned. a spokesperson for putin wrote, trump s statement echoes what putin has been saying for the past 16 or 17 years about the need for a joint fight against this common threat. no single country can fight it on their own. in terms of your larger question about the best way to tackle it, i don t think anybody exactly knows because there isn t a sort of one size fits all answer to eradicating terrorism. the three examples that president-elect trump gave, one example was in zurich, where three muslims were shot in a mosque. one is a situation in turkey between russia and turkey based on the atrocities playing out in aleppo that frankly could have been any one of a number of millions of muslims who feel horrified by the atrocities they have seen taking place in aleppo. that does not necessarily fall into the rubric in a classical sense of a sort of isis or militant attack. and then you have, of course, the attack that we saw in
is this a directive coming from isis? yeah, i mean, the former spokesman of isis said this in 2014. he said, look, it s becoming more difficult for you to make the immigration to come here and be a trained up agent of isis, so stay where you are and use whatever means or tools are at your disposal. take a knife, stab the infidel through the heart, take a rock, smash his head in, get in a car, drive over him. the last issue of isis propaganda magazine had a whole feature on exactly the kind of knife that cuts through human flesh the best, which kind of knife a jihadi should wield. so there s going to be this renewed focus on very kind of low-tech, you might even say crude methods of mass murder. it s much easier anyone can get in a car in europe. it s harder to get an ar-15 in europe. so this does bear all the hallmarks of what isis has been trying to do. paul, what is your take on
in trump s statements that he called out terror attacks against christians but didn t mention that several of the attacks we saw yesterday were brought against muslims and that muslims are, in fact, some of the greatest victims of terrorism around the world. that went unsaid in his statement. also, trump, i think, is signaling that these attacks, no matter what their motives or even who they were going against, are going to fall into a category of things that help him make the case against isis, things that help him align himself more closely with countries like russia, who he believes is fighting terrorism in a way that he wants the united states to emulate. what that means for what that could potentially mean for u.s. foreign policy is that while there s a lot of concern about
against an upscale shopping mall of paris. he had tasked his female cousin with buying two expensive suits worth more than $5,000 for him and another male attacker who hasn t been identified yet. and their plans was to get into this shopping district, dress very sharply to blend in. obviously, they would have the element of surprise bus no one would expect to dressed that way on a killing spree. the fact that he wanted command and control during the attack is really i have to come back to it. it s a cause for concern for western security officials as something to look for in future attacks. absolutely right. and it really raises the bar of what isis can be capable of.