Appearing on “Special Report” Wednesday night, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer opined that individual attacks such as the shooting at Parliament Hill in Ottawa Wednesday is “the new face of terrorism.” Krauthammer also touched on how times have changed since the 1990s and 9/11 in particular, when terror organizations would have to send people to Western civilization to carry out these attacks.
Krauthammer: Well this is the new story of terrorism. On 9/11 and in the 1990s when they wanted to get to you, they’d send people over. We’ve develop great techniques for stopping that or tracking that, and we haven’t had a major attack from abroad ever since.
Now what I think has happened, with the tremendous ideological appeal of ISIS, and that’s largely a result of its victories, and that’s always appealing in messianic movements, it’s now getting these individuals already in Western societies to act on their own.
What’s interesting here is there was an attack two days ago where someone drove a car, killed a Canadian policeman, also a convert. Also somebody who had connections, obviously, or some kind of allegiances to Jihadism. He had it on his website. Whether these two guys are connected doesn’t even matter; it looks as if the appeal of ISIS is such that they can now spark these attacks, minor attacks of course compared with 9/11, without lifting a finger, without organizing what, for example, al-Qaida in Yemen does: Create a bomb, send somebody on a plane, and that’s the new face of terror.