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.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.