Islamist Terror Plots Keep Getting Foiled — and Keep Coming

A ccording to the charging documents, 40-year-old Benny Caldera Jr. sought to execute a one-man massacre at the Texas State Capitol in Austin late last month because the Jews made him do it. “Arrest documents further state that Caldera told his friend that he was angry at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and that ‘these people have to be exterminated,’” NBC News reported.

The attempted attack was similar in kind to a variety of other plots that narrowly failed to produce the bloodshed envisioned by their plotters.

The Texas attacker’s motives and methods didn’t depart much from those of Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, two radicalized ISIS supporters, according to the Justice Department, who threw an improvised explosive device at a crowd in New York City in March. It is akin to Mohamed Bailor Jalloh’s shooting spree in an Old Dominion University ROTC classroom that same month. It is reminiscent of Ayman Mohamed Ghazali’s assault on Michigan’s Temple Israel synagogue, in which dozens of children might have perished had the attack unfolded as planned.

It is probably not a coincidence that the tempo of attempted terrorist events grew with the onset of renewed hostilities with Iran. The events in Texas were, however, mercifully less coordinated than the attempted attacks on American targets by groups with direct ties to Iran. A Kata’ib Hezbollah plot against Jewish institutions in New York City and Los Angeles; an ISIS-inspired plan to attack U.S. service personnel in Kansas and California; an Islamist conspiracy to bomb the New York State Capitol building in Albany — the pattern is hard to miss.

Indeed, even Europe has caught on, albeit out of necessity. There, the Islamist terrorist threat is increasingly pronounced, and it comes with even more operational links to Iran.

Within weeks of the start of Operation Epic Fury, a “string of attacks on Jewish institutions and property across Europe” left investigators asking if “Iran or its proxies are behind the incidents,” the New York Times reported at the time. Since then, Iran’s complicity has been established in, for example, a series of arson attacks on Jewish sites in the U.K., the bombing and arson attacks targeting Jewish institutions in Belgium, attempted assassinations, and so on. “MI5 previously said it had disrupted 20 Iran-linked plots in Britain over a 12-month period,” Iran International reported this week.

To a certain extent, this is the sort of Islamist terrorism with which the West has become lamentably familiar over the past quarter century. It’s the kind of terrorism that is often carried out by radicalized individuals with few direct links to state-supported entities who zero in on soft, civilian targets. And surely, many of the successful and attempted terrorist episodes above were merely inspired by the conflict with Iran. But it’s hard to miss the Iranian fingerprints on several recent plots. And with pressure mounting on the Islamic Republic, it is growing bolder.

This week, the U.S. rushed its B-1 bomber fleet out of England’s RAF Fairford air base just one week after police broke up an allegedly Iran-linked cell as it engaged in suspicious activity around the facility. British police have now made seven arrests in connection with that plot, which London now belatedly acknowledges had links back to Tehran. Several media outlets have now reported that the warplanes were evacuated from the U.K. on a contingency basis because intelligence indicated that a “multifaceted Iranian plot to target the aircraft and kill personnel at RAF Fairford, including American pilots,” was afoot, per the Wall Street Journal. The plot may have involved a “complex drone attack ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

This development has profound implications for the future of the U.S.-U.K. alliance. If British soil is not safe for the deployment of America’s most sensitive weapons platforms — indeed, if they are vulnerable to an Operation Spiderweb–style indigenous drone-swarm attack — America’s deployment posture in Europe will soon have to undergo a radical makeover. At the very least, the audacious nature of this plot, with all its complex moving parts, suggests Iran is pulling out all the stops.

What we’re learning about the FlyDubai hijacking conveys that same impression. Asked this week if he believed that Iran was responsible for the attempted Islamist takeover of Flight FZ1073, Donald Trump answered, “I personally do.”

This isn’t the first time the president has accused Iran of involvement in the plot executed by an Omani national. And while the president says a lot of things, often without evidence, he was correct to point the finger at Iran after the plot against RAF Fairford was exposed. What’s more, he was right at a time when the press was happy to defer to British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s casual dismissal of the prospect of Iranian involvement.

At the very least, we can deduce that the Islamist terrorist threat is as elevated as it has been since the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre. In addition, while it’s unlikely that Iran is directly responsible for all or even most of the above attacks, it is doing what it can to foment terrorist violence.