This conflict has already moved beyond the region where it began. It is no longer just a story about missile launches over Israel, strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, or tension in the Strait of Hormuz. It has now reached into Europe, and it has reached into the United States. In other words, the war has come home.
Over the last twenty-four hours alone, we saw two terror attacks inside the United States, both tied to jihadi lone-wolf actors. Investigators are still sorting out whether those incidents were coordinated in any meaningful operational sense, and my own suspicion is that they probably were not, but they occurred close enough together in time to create understandable concern. The larger point is not whether those two attacks were centrally directed from some bunker halfway around the world. The larger point is that the ideological fire has already spread, and we should expect more sparks before this is over.
One of those attacks took place at Old Dominion University, where a man entered an ROTC class, confirmed that it was indeed the ROTC class, and then opened fire on the instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shaw. I do not name mass shooters, because I refuse to give evil free publicity, but I will absolutely name the victims, because they are the ones whose memory deserves honor. Lieutenant Colonel Shaw was a combat veteran who had served with the 82nd Airborne, and he was murdered in that classroom.
What happened next says a great deal about the kind of courage America desperately needs to recover. Rather than scatter, hide, and pray the violence would pass them by, the students in that room converged on the shooter. They tackled him, subdued him, and, in the words of the police chief, rendered him “no longer alive.” Additional reporting later indicated that one of the students had a pocketknife and used it repeatedly until the threat was over. It was brutal, and it was tragic, but it was also the kind of response that actually stops evil instead of cowering in the face of it.
I have said for years that I do not like the way we train people to respond to mass casualty events. We tell them to “run, hide, fight,” as though fighting were some regrettable last resort rather than the morally necessary thing to do when someone is murdering innocent people in front of you. My view is very simple: if a shooter is in a room full of people and he is the only one with a weapon, then every able-bodied man in that room should turn and converge on him. Yes, some people may get hurt in the process. That is awful, but if we make a habit of meeting evil with decisive force, we will eventually see less of it.
I remember once being on a military installation during the Obama years and seeing a poster instructing soldiers that in the event of a mass shooting they should run away, hide, and only fight as a last resort. Underneath all of that was the phrase, “Don’t be a hero.” I remember standing there thinking that if there is one place on earth where we ought to be cultivating heroism, it is on an American military base. The idea that we would tell our soldiers not to be heroes is the kind of moral confusion that only a very soft and very unserious culture could produce. At Old Dominion, those students rejected that message instinctively, and I thank God they did. May the memory of Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shaw be a blessing.
The second attack took place at what was described as the nation’s largest synagogue, located in Detroit. An assailant rammed his vehicle into the entrance and opened fire through the windows at security personnel. In that case, the outcome was different for one very important reason: the synagogue had prepared. Security had recently conducted active-shooter training, they were already on high alert, and they were equipped to respond. The guards neutralized the threat before the attacker managed to kill anyone inside. That is not luck. That is what preparation looks like, and it is the kind of sober realism more institutions in the West are going to need in the months and years ahead.
According to the information I cited in the live, both of these attackers were American citizens, but both had been radicalized. In the case of the Old Dominion shooter, I noted that he had previously been arrested in 2013 for material support to ISIS, imprisoned, and then released in 2024. Whatever the final public record says about every detail in that case, the broader pattern is not hard to see. The threat is not theoretical, and it is not entirely external. Radicalization is already present inside our own borders, and wartime conditions only make that more dangerous.
Nor were these the only incidents worth noting. There was a thwarted synagogue attack in Norway, additional attacks in Israel including a stabbing and an attempted vehicle ramming, and the grim reality that in Israel these kinds of attacks have become so common they barely make international news anymore. That fact alone ought to tell us something. One side in this broader conflict has normalized violence against civilians to such a degree that the outside world has become numb to it. When attacks pile up in this many countries within such a short period of time, and when the same ideological slogans accompany them over and over again, it becomes absurd to pretend we do not recognize the common denominator.
