I made a resolution this past Thanksgiving. Having just published yet another article on terrorism, I decided that I didn’t want to come back to that baleful topic during the coming holiday season. I’ve wrestled professionally with the subject of terrorism for virtually my entire adult life, first as an academic researcher, then, for more than three decades, as a hands-on security professional engaged in protecting our most sensitive national security targets from terrorist attack. It remains a focus in both my fiction and in my articles for The American Spectator.

We can get on with our lives while taking terrorism seriously and incorporating serious security measures into the way we go about living.
Still, taking a break seemed very much worthwhile as I tried to get into the spirit of the Christmas season. I avoided commenting on the assassination of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, even though it reminded me of Germany’s notorious Baader-Meinhof gang and the assassinations of Siegfried Buback, Jurgen Ponto, and Hanns-Martin Schleyer, events in 1977 that decisively influenced my involvement with terrorism.
I passed the December 21st anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing without comment, even though the event remains highly personal to me. And I held back from commenting when someone drove a car into the Christmas street market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing five and injuring hundreds.
But now the holiday season has ended, and, with the horrific news from New Orleans, I can hold back no longer.
As of this writing, at least 15 people are confirmed dead, with dozens injured after a man drove a pickup truck into a crowd celebrating the new year on Bourbon Street. When the truck finally stopped, the man then began firing into the crowd and at police, wounding at least two officers before being shot and killed. We also read that multiple explosive devices were found at the scene, and that the driver showed evidence of jihadi affiliations. Perhaps significantly, the truck w...