How America’s willful blindness has stoked the Islamist terror threat

Pennsylvania teen Emir Balat attempting to detonate an IED outside of Gracie Mansion in Manhattan on March 7, 2026. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

After four separate terrorist attacks in the last two weeks on US soil, Americans are on edge.

It’s taken me back to 2003 and a barren outpost in Khost, Afghanistan, where I interrogated a high-value target while serving with the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team.

“You’ll go back to your country. But this struggle will follow you there,” the detainee pronounced, through an interpreter.

“We can be patient. You Americans certainly are not. We will wait you out. And the fight will continue.”

He was right.

On March 1, a radical Islamist and naturalized citizen from Senegal shot up a bar in Austin, Texas, murdering three.

On March 7, two teenaged jihadi wannabes from Pennsylvania — children of naturalized citizens from Afghanistan and Turkey — tossed homemade bombs at cops and protesters outside Gracie Mansion in New York City.

On Thursday, radical Islamists in Virginia and Michigan carried out two independent attacks: In one, a convicted ISIS-inspired terrorist from Sierra Leone killed a decorated ROTC instructor; in the other, an armed gunman — a naturalized citizen from Lebanon — attempted to smash his explosives-laden vehicle into a Jewish preschool.

Note the common thread: All these attackers were either naturalized citizens or their offspring.

And in each instance, the attack was predictable and preventable.

This is no criticism of law enforcement; they must get it right every single time — an attacker, but once.

And a nation predicated on civil liberties and Fourth Amendment privacy provisions must endure the risks of such freedoms along with their benefits.

Nonetheless, we have assuredly brought this plague upon ourselves.

We steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that the terror threat within our borders is stoked from the outside, inspired by those who hate us and wish us dead.

Make no mistake — this is asymmetric warfare, and Iran is not its only driver.

The sooner we recognize that radical Islam has been at war with the West for far longer than anyone reading this has been alive, the sooner we can begin to better confront this threat.

America’s support for Israel post-Oct. 7 and our current efforts to degrade and destroy the Iranian regime’s nuclear fever dream have served as wake-up calls to jihadists.

When we pretend that borders don’t exist, bad actors like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran lick their chops.

Sleeper cells remain one of the biggest threats to face the homeland, with the long-term mission of conducting sabotage, espionage and acts of terror.

But “self-radicalized” individuals are perhaps an even more dangerous part of the broader Islamist strategy.

The Internet delivers messages from ISIS and other groups to disaffected, disenchanted and susceptible-to-persuasion “jihadists” right in their American homes.

These manipulated radicals do not need to be given orders; they hear the siren’s song and act upon their interpretation of same — no direct communication with foreign terror organizations necessary.

And after the Biden administration spent years wasting resources on the phantom threat of white supremacy, radical Islam remains rabidly and stubbornly pervasive.

Expect more of what we have endured the past two weeks — because for terror networks, attention and propaganda are the coin of the realm.

Since Hamas launched its Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli civilians and Iran’s other terror proxies joined the effort to wreak havoc in the Middle East, ISIS has been starved of its publicity oxygen.

This is why the FBI has attributed much of the recent domestic uptick in jihadist attacks to the Islamic State: It desperately needs to be seen and heard amid the ongoing war against Iran.

Meanwhile, America’s “suicidal empathy,” a phrase coined by Gad Saad to describe the excessive, blind compassion our legal immigration system fosters, is doing great harm.

We have done little to address the lack of assimilation of certain immigrant communities, and even less to fight the tendency of law-abiding Muslims to tolerate the radicals in their midst.

We’ve also allowed the left’s constant cries of “Islamophobia” to fester in our culture.

I’ve heard from too many cops that witnesses increasingly feel reluctant to report perceived threats to law enforcement, for fear of being thought of as bigoted, racist or Islamophobic.

That has to change.

The threat of terrorism in America is “higher now than it’s been in decades,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said last week.

That’s true: Not based on this rash of recent incidents, but on credible intelligence that the FBI has been collecting across my 25 years in the bureau and in the decade since. 

That detainee in 2003 was chillingly correct. The fight does continue.

It never went away. It is here.

We either acknowledge that and confront it — or we will perish at the hands of purposeful ignorance and suicidal empathy.

James A. Gagliano is a retired FBI supervisory special agent and a Fox News contributor.