The first month of the year is behind us, and so is the season for predictions. But if there’s one thing we can be sure of as this year unfolds, it’s this: 2016 will be the year of the Islamists.
It doesn’t take a Las Vegas handicapper to know it. The State Department’s annual report on terrorism revealed that the number of people killed by terror attacks rose by 80 percent, to nearly 33,000, in 2014. Things weren’t any better in 2015.
This will be the year of the Islamists because they’re facing no competing force. No opponents with the will to fight them — or their ideas. And it’s not just the people of Middle East and Africa who will suffer in this year of the Islamists. It will be Europeans and Americans.
It happened late last year in San Bernardino. And the month before in Paris. And earlier the year before in Paris, when Islamic radicals targeted the creatives at Charlie Hebdo and the patrons and workers at a nearby kosher deli.
These weren’t spectacular mass murders of the 9/11 variety, but they were, in some ways, worse — because they were carried out by lone Islamist wolves, part of a loose network of international killers who report to no one.