The recent terrorist attack in Manhattan could easily have been far deadlier, notes Graeme Wood, had the perpetrator followed the guidelines Islamic State (IS) distributed for vehicular rammings. But, Wood writes, it would be unwise to expect other jihadists to be so ineffective:

[A]s long as Islamic State’s attackers are idiots like Sayfullo Saipov, our societies can probably handle them. . . . The Idiots’ Crusade is a manageable problem.

Much less tolerable would be a campaign of competent terror—the kind of mayhem enabled by training, like that of the 2015 Bataclan killers in Paris, or by patient planning, like that done by Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas. There is not much to be done about the idiots, but their idiocy provides a natural limit to the damage they can do. As Islamic State loses territory, the greatest danger remains the prospect that some of the battle-hardened fighters will return home, raising the average IQ of attackers, and making possible attacks that would be many times deadlier than this one.

America’s strategy in Syria is to demolish Islamic State while minimizing the possibility that one of the smart terrorists will slip away. Eight people are dead, tragically, in lower Manhattan. That the number is not higher is a reminder of how important it is that that strategy be pursued with undiminished vigor.

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.