On August 23, a reporter for Ohio State University’s campus newspaper interviewed a fellow student named Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a soft-spoken Muslim who expressed his concerns over the media’s portrayal of his coreligionists and his fear that he might be attacked by bigots. Just over three months later, Artan—a devotee of Islamic State and al-Qaeda—went on a murderous attack, wounding ten students and a professor. The interviewer, Kevin Stankiewicz, recently wrote an article in the Washington Post reflecting on Artan’s presumed transformation from “thoughtful, engaged student” to terrorist. Noting that Stankiewicz doesn’t seem to have entertained the possibility that Artan was simply concealing his views, Sam Schulman connects this lack of imagination with current obsessions over “hate speech”:

On a Facebook page discovered by law-enforcement officials, Artan had quite different complaints from the concern about the bigoted thoughts of [other] students. He was enraged at Burma’s oppression of its Muslim minority and connected it to the war on Islamic State conducted by America and its “fellow apostate allies.” . . . He fingers as traitors to Islam several prominent Islamic teachers and imams in Texas. . . . He concludes by swearing on the deity that he is “willing to use a billion infidels in retribution.” . . .

Our reliance upon speech censors to detect and cure evil has disarmed us to such a degree that even a journalist forgets the first tool of his trade: suspicion. It doesn’t occur to Stankiewicz that a man who in November dies as a soldier of IS might in August have concealed his thirst for revenge on America and on Muslim scholars whom he considers heretics. (There is nothing particularly Islamic about deception; any secret agent in Artan’s position would dissemble, whether Nazi, Communist, Irish nationalist, or French résistant.)

Stankiewicz is admirably careful about making too strong a case for the theory that hate speech against Artan’s religion caused the “thoughtful, engaged” student to “snap” and become the very different person who tried to kill as many of his fellow students as he could, using the techniques that IS recommends to its admirers in the West. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, is not so reluctant. Commenting on the attack, he told reporters, “If we respond to this situation by casting aspersions on millions of people that adhere to a particular religion or if we increase our suspicion of people who practice a particular religion, we are more likely going to contribute to acts of violence than we are to prevent them.”

If expressing dislike of Islam to Muslims will cause them to become terrorists in the future, then this must be what the White House believes happened to Artan. There is an easy cure in that case: . . . don’t say that a small minority of Muslims are more likely than a small minority of adherents of other faiths to become terrorists. If we watch our tongues, we [also] don’t have to keep watch on radical mosques, which will please the ACLU.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.