The terror attack in New Orleans ought to remind Americans that Islamist terrorism never went away.

The horror in New Orleans ought to remind Americans what it’s been all too easy to forget in recent years: We may be tired of thinking about Islamist terrorists, but they’re not tired of thinking about us.

Many, if not most, Americans had hoped that by withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021, we could rid ourselves of the greater Middle East and its troublesome geopolitics after two decades of conflict following September 11. And anyway, ought we not concentrate on Communist China and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific?

It hasn’t worked out that way. The phony peace and quiet of October 6, 2023, that Israel believed itself to be experiencing was shattered by October 7. What followed was 15 months of deadly war on several fronts — against Hamas in Gaza, against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, against the Houthis in Yemen, and against the Islamic Republic of Iran. But even though the United States has been a de facto belligerent against multiple arms of the anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Western jihad over that period, most Americans could be forgiven for barely giving it any thought at all on account of just how little the Biden administration or the national press wanted to talk about any of that.

Now, the phony peace and quiet of December 31, 2024, has been shattered by the barbarism on Bourbon Street in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day.

When Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove into a crowd of New Year’s revelers with a pickup truck flying an Islamic State flag and then engaged in a shootout with the police, his psychopathic, murderous intent shocked the nation. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t have. This tactic is a well-known and celebrated ISIS calling card. The carnage on Bourbon Street is the direct descendant of the 2016 Islamic State truck rampage in Nice, France, that killed 86 people and injured hundreds of others. It’s the deranged offspring of the 2016 attack in Berlin’s Christmas market that killed 13. It’s the direct follow-up to the 2017 truck attack that killed eight people and injured a dozen others on Manhattan’s West Side. 

There have been many other such incidents over the years, including in London, in Spain, and in Canada.

And, as NR’s David Zimmermann reports, Alethea Duncan, the FBI assistant special agent in charge in New Orleans, told reporters that the FBI “do[es] not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible.”

We may wish it away, but the jihad is coming for us. And, indeed, it never went away.

As Brian Stewart wrote for the magazine just two months ago, in an essay titled “ISIS Plots Its Return,”

The scourge of holy war is an old story. But one shudders to think of what new calamities it may have in store if passivity remains the defining feature of Western statecraft. It is always difficult to imagine the grave dangers arising in far-off lands, especially when the West has grown accustomed to living with a wide margin of safety. But if history is any guide, a policy of reduced responsibility in the face of an implacable enemy will narrow that margin of safety dramatically. And perhaps even suddenly.

Now, Islamist terrorism is indeed suddenly and horrifically back on the minds of many Americans.

Stewart’s essay is prescient and well worth reading. He argues for a much more forceful and aggressive approach to confronting the jihad — an approach for which, Stewart readily concedes, there appears to be very little stomach on the part of any Western government or people aside from Israel’s.

It’s true that Stewart didn’t anticipate the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, which has scrambled the dynamic a bit, causing a few of the details of his argument and his proposed prescriptions to become dated. But the unforeseen rise to power of the Sunni militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in ISIS’s Syrian heartland hasn’t obviated Stewart’s fundamental point. On the contrary, it has heightened it: “The governing class ought to consider how much more force will be required — and in more adverse conditions — if ISIS is permitted to reconstitute its statelet and begins to orchestrate a new campaign of global terror.”

The jihad has returned. We should consider doing something about it.