Last Friday, Islamic State’s “Sinai Province” carried out a carefully planned terror attack on a Sufi mosque, killing over 300 worshippers. Examining its motivations, Yoram Schweitzer and Ofir Winter ask whether the attack will lead to a shift in how the Egyptian regime pursues its campaign against both Islamic State (IS) and the other terrorist groups operating within its borders:

From [IS’s] perspective, the attack was designed to serve several operational and ideological goals: first, to project a show of its strength at a time [when the organization] is being trounced in Iraq and Syria and challenged by competing terrorist groups (Egypt and Sinai are [also] home to groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood); second, to humiliate the Egyptian regime by portraying it to domestic and international publics as helpless, and to deal another blow to its efforts to rebuild the nation’s economy and tourist industry; third, to settle a score [with] locals cooperating with the regime’s struggle against terrorism . . . and to deter other groups from doing the same; fourth, to torpedo the understandings reached over the last year between the Egyptian regime and Hamas about increased supervision of the Gaza-Sinai border and opening the Rafah crossing [connecting Gaza to Egypt]; and, finally, to harm the believers in Sufism, seen by some Salafist jihadist groups as heretics who have deviated from the true path of Sunni Islam and are therefore subject to the death penalty. . . .

The increasing number of attacks in Sinai has forced the Egyptian regime to embark on a series of military operations against the jihadists, but despite the military efforts, attacks have continued unabated in the peninsula, taking a steep human toll, in particular of police and army personnel. . . . While the expanding Egyptian campaign against terrorism in Sinai succeeded in 2017 in eliminating many terrorists and senior leaders and reducing the number of attacks overall, the attacks that were carried out have become more focused and deadly. . . .

Egypt must make radical changes in how it fights terrorism in general and in Sinai in particular. The Egyptian security services are in urgent need of reorganization, closer coordination, and increased cooperation [among themselves].

[Furthermore, Egypt must have] high-quality, accurate intelligence, which makes it possible to target elements planning, assisting, and perpetrating the terrorism in a focused way, and distinguishing them from the population at large. This distinction is critical to reducing the civilian population’s motivation to cooperate with the terrorists and encourage the locals to help the authorities actively fight terrorism.

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.