The American People Deserve Leaders Who Fight Terrorism – Not Excuse It

The threat of terrorism on American soil is very real. Just a week ago, America experienced not one but two terrorist attacks: the attempted massacre at the Temple Israel Synagogue in Detroit, and the shooting at Old Dominion University that left Army Lt. Col. Brandon A. Shah dead and two others injured. This followed a mass shooting at a bar in Austin that killed four and injured 15, now being investigated as a potential act of terrorism, and the attempted bombing outside of Gracie Mansion by two ISIS supporters on March 7.

These attacks came amid heightened concerns that the increasingly desperate Iranian regime could activate sleeper cells inside the U.S. and elsewhere around the world. Indeed, one of the many casus belli for the war with Iran is its decades of funding and orchestrating acts of terror against Americans around the world. We also continue to face a sustained threat from ISIS-affiliates or ISIS-inspired terrorists, who have used October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war to disarm Hamas as a powerful recruiting tool and justification for new attacks.

One would hope that political leaders of both parties would be determined to treat this problem with the utmost seriousness. Surely, we all remember that terrible day on September 11, 2001, and can unite around ensuring something like that never happens again. Yet as I write this, Senate Democrats are holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security and risking our security and safety in an attempt to score petty political points.

This isn’t a game, and the cynical politicians treating it as such should be ashamed of themselves. Much as we’d like to think that Islamist terrorism is yesterday’s problem, this threat is as opportunistic as it is adaptable. As a former CIA Director, one of the most important parts of my job was to protect Americans from international terrorism and to work with intelligence counterparts around the world to do so. I saw firsthand how this danger ebbs and flows depending on a combination of geopolitical events, the mitigation of domestic vulnerabilities, and sometimes sheer luck. As the IRA infamously said after their failed attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.”

Cynical legislative gamesmanship isn’t our only problem. Radical leftists like Zohran Mamdani routinely downplay, excuse, or even make common cause with terrorist supporters. Indeed, Mamdani’s reaction to the attempted bombing outside of his own residence earlier this month was extremely telling: Instead of forthrightly calling out the terrorists who could have killed scores of people, his first reaction was to bury any mention of this near-catastrophe under scorn for the far-Right activist who was their target. Blaming the victim instead of the terrorist is absolutely outrageous. How can the people of New York feel safe under such a leader?

Thankfully, the Trump Administration is tackling the threat of terrorism on both the domestic and international fronts. Indeed, the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran is a long-overdue response to the war that the Islamic Republic has waged against the U.S. and Israel since coming to power in 1979. President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have dispensed with the unacceptable status quo of the past five decades, in which the West attempted to manage or appease the Ayatollah and his cronies, and are doing the world a great service by defanging this irredeemable regime. Once the Islamic Republic is no longer able to fund global terrorism, an enormous threat will have been neutralized, and we will have established a powerful deterrent to other funders or aspiring funders of global terrorism.

We can never afford to become complacent. We must continue to invest in world-class intelligence operations to foil attacks at home and abroad, and use all the tools at our disposal to combat and contain the spread of jihadist terrorism. We must understand the vulnerabilities to radicalization within our communities and take action to address them. We must never return to the open-borders policies that left us vulnerable to infiltration by foreign operatives. We must ensure that the Department of Homeland Security is fully funded and call out the politicians who have treated it as a political football. And together with Israel, we must finish the job of disempowering the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.

Let’s not be under any illusions – terrorism as a tactic will always be with us in some form or another. But leaders of integrity who are willing to do the necessary to combat the threat at home and abroad can deprive them of the space and resources the terrorists need to thrive, and deliver security for the American people and the world at large.

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