Islamic State, writes Amir Taheri, has based its approach to warfare not only on the example of Algerian and Palestinian terrorists but also on the Quran. The U.S. and its allies have the ability to counter its tactics easily, if only they have the will to do so:

IS patterns its military strategy on that of the Prophet Muhammad, which is to say it organizes ghazwa (raids) against soft targets. The Muslim warrior has always been known as the ghazi, a man who takes part in a ghazwa. However, a ghazwa is regarded as religiously permissible only if the ghazis are more than 50-percent sure of victory. Otherwise, they should return and wait for a better day. That is what the prophet himself did in his only attempt at ghazwa against the Byzantines.

Waging at least one annual ghazwa became an almost religious obligation for Islamic caliphs and rulers from the 8th century onward. . . . It took the Persians and the Byzantines almost two centuries to learn the trick [of defeating it]. They understood that, facing no resistance, the ghazi moves rapidly ahead, like a knife through butter, but will come to a halt if he encounters something hard on his way. . . .

Continuing the tradition, IS goes where it is easy to go and flees from where it is difficult to resist. . . . So far, IS has been relatively successful because it has not hit anything hard on its way. The homeopathic air strikes reluctantly ordered by President Obama have boosted IS’s narrative of Islamic victimhood without doing much real damage. . . . If François Hollande manages to create a new coalition, something still uncertain at the time of this writing, the aim should be to wrest the initiative away from IS. . . .

If IS begins to lose its aura of easy winning, it would face numerous hostile armed groups [formerly] allied with it because, in the Middle East at least, everyone prefers to be on the side of the winner.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.