On Friday night, the Egyptian-born religious leader and terrorist mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, died in an American prison. Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the prosecution of the sheikh for planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, reflects on his blood-soaked career:

Before there was an al-Qaeda or an Islamic State, there was the Blind Sheikh, known to his worldwide following as “the emir of jihad.” And he bears much of the responsibility—he would think of it as the credit—for what followed him. Indeed, Osama bin Laden credited Sheikh Abdel Rahman with the fatwa that approved the 9/11 jihadist attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered. . . .

Abdel Rahman was [deeply influenced by such contemporaries as] the Shiite jihadist icon, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Notwithstanding their theological differences, Abdel Rahman, [a Sunni], perceived in Khomeini the possibilities of Islamic revolution and the exploitation of what he saw as American weakness—particularly by Hizballah, Khomeini’s forward jihadist militia that, among other atrocities, killed 241 U.S. Marines in their Beirut barracks in 1983. . . .

Abdel Rahman also revered Sayyid Qutb, his fellow Egyptian and a Muslim Brotherhood hero long imprisoned and eventually executed by the hated Nasser regime. . . . Qutb . . . infused his teaching with visceral anti-Semitism, portraying the Jew as the instantiation of all that is anti-Islamic and treacherous. Abdel Rahman drank deeply from this noxious well. [Indeed, he] became most notorious for issuing the fatwa relied upon by the jihadists who murdered the Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat at a military parade in 1981—for the unforgivable offense of making peace with Israel. . . .

[Abdel Rahman’s] acolytes included Sayyid Nosair, Mohamed Salameh, Mahmud Abuhalima, and Nidal Ayyad—to name just a few. . . . In 1990, Nosair murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane, the controversial founder of the Jewish Defense League, at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. On February 26, 1993, Salameh, Abuhalima, and Ayyad, along with Ramzi Yousef, carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center—a plot long in the making, much of which was planned during visits to Nosair at Attica prison in upstate New York.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.