jihadi terrorism | First One Through

Spring break arrives and the terminals fill. Families in flip-flops inch forward. Teenagers clutch boarding passes. Parents juggle passports, snacks, and patience. The line barely moves. Weeks later it repeats on Passover and Easter: travel with checkpoints.

While it feels like inconvenience, it is much more.

It is memory.
It is cost.
It is consequence.

The line begins with the September 11 attacks, when operatives from the genocidal jihadist group al-Qaeda boarded planes as passengers and turned them into weapons. Nearly three thousand civilians were killed in a single morning. The attack followed a clear logic: target civilians in the West, maximize scale, use the openness of modern Democratic systems against themselves.

Out of that morning came the Transportation Security Administration. The bins. The scanners. The choreography of shoes, belts, and laptops. A system built to harden what had already been breached.

It continues today at scale.

The United States still designates a range of these Islamic superiority groups as terrorist organizations:

al-Qaeda
Islamic State (ISIS)
al-Shabaab
Boko Haram
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
Hamas
Hezbollah

They differ in leadership, geography, and strategy yet converge in one place: the justification of violence against western civilians in the name of radical Islam.

Hamas makes the convergence unmistakable. Its founding charter is replete with calls to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State. Its leadership has framed the conflict in absolutist terms. And on October 7, its fighters carried out coordinated attacks that deliberately targeted civilians—families in homes, people at a music festival—turning them into instruments of terror in a way that was both intentional and public.

Different names and different flags. Same methodology and targets.

Those jihadi ideas do not stay contained to a battlefield. They reshape daily life.

It shows up in synagogues and churches where doors are locked and guards stand watch during prayer. In stadiums and concerts where bags are checked and perimeters hardened. In city streets lined with barriers. In subway systems with armed patrols. In office buildings where access is controlled and monitored.

Islamic extremist Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem Abedi bomb Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK

Everyday life has been redesigned around the possibility of civilian targeting.

Every traveler standing in a TSA line is paying part of that price. Every secured synagogue, every guarded stadium, every hardened entrance carries the same cost.

Aviation remains a focus for a reason. It concentrates civilians. It symbolizes openness. It offers reach. So the security system stays because the threat did not disappear.

As in Israel, faced with daily threats.

Spring break travelers do not think about jihadi ideology when they remove their shoes. Families heading to a Passover seder or an Easter gathering do not connect their delay to Islamic extremist networks.

But they are connected.

To a morning in September.
To an idea that still circulates.
To organizations that still recruit, plan, and attack.

Which are now being promoted and protected by elected officials and a socialist-jihadi alliance growing inside the West.

We tend to think of “ground zero” as a place, a site of destruction. Where you can point to and say: it happened here.

The new ground zeros are not simply where attacks occur. They are where the vulgar idea stops sounding outrageous.

They form in environments where the rules quietly change, where violence against Jews is never explicitly endorsed, but is no longer cleanly condemned. It is where it is explained. Contextualized. Where the language shifts just enough that the victim is converted into the villain.

You can see it in parts of political culture that elect figures like Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani without seriously confronting the ideological space around them.

*Rep. Rashida Tlaib called Jews conspirators who operate “behind the curtain” to “make money off of racism” at the Democratic Socialist of America convention*

Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the man who came to murder hundreds of children at a Jewish day school in Michigan, lived in Rashida Tlaib’s Michigan district, home to thousand of people who believe Tlaib’s rhetoric, who support – or least excuse – her vile antisemitism.

The same motion can be seen in New York City where Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and came to the city that elected a jihadist mayor to rain violence on perceived enemies.

*Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, readying a bomb to throw at police and civilians in New York City*

Ideas shape environments. And environments shape what becomes possible.

It happens quickly: it took barely a decade for NYC to go from a capitalist moderate Jewish mayor in Michael Bloomberg, to an anti-capitalist jihadist in Zohran Mamdani.

When enough people participate in erasing the moral line, the boundary that once made violence unthinkable begins to weaken. And when that boundary weakens, the outliers don’t need instructions.

They need atmosphere.

The new ground zero is not the place where it happens. It is where it no longer feels impossible.