Opinion Luck by chance

Then,last week,security teams removed packages from cargo planes in Britain and the UAE bound for Chicago. Inside,they found bombs wired to cellphones and hidden in the toner cartridges of computer printers. The bombs,timed to go off when the planes were over America,were believed to have been built by the same Saudi jihadist,Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri,who designed the Christmas Day underwear bomb. An intelligence tip from the Saudis upset that plan.

Imagine if all five had gone off? We would be checking the underwear of every airline passenger,you would have to pass through metal detectors to walk into Times Square or take the subway,and the global air cargo industry would be in turmoil.

So,yes,we won the lottery five times in a row — and that’s just the attempts we know about. But one of these days,our luck is going to run out because the savage madness emanating from Al Qaeda,and from its different franchisees — like the branches in Yemen and Iraq — is only increasing.

A week ago,a Baghdad church was attacked. Here is how The Associated Press described it: Seven or eight Al Qaeda-linked Muslim militants “charged through the front doors of the church,interrupting the evening Mass service. They rushed down the aisle,brandishing their machine guns and spraying the room with bullets. They ordered the priest to call the Vatican to demand the release of Muslim women who they claimed were being held captive by the Coptic Church in Egypt. When the priest said he could not do that,the gunmen shot him and turned their guns on the congregation,killing most of those in the front pew.” When the Iraqi police moved in,scores more were killed in the shootout. Last Friday,pro-Taliban bombers blew up two mosques during Friday prayer in northwestern Pakistan,killing more than 60 worshippers.

When Muslim jihadists are ready to just gun down or blow up unarmed men,women and children in the midst of prayer it means there are no moral,cultural or religious restraints left on the Islamic fringe. It’s anything goes.

What to do? So many,but not all,of the suicide bombers come from failing,humiliated societies that generate huge numbers of “sitting-around people,” easy prey for recruiters. We need to do what we can to eliminate their sources of energy. That means finishing our business in Afghanistan and Iraq,and settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,and getting our military out of that region. But these will never be sufficient. There is a civil war in Islam today. This stuff only stops when the Muslim forces of decency triumph — and delegitimise and crush the barbarism of Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile,we need to focus on the things we can control. For starters,we’re going to have to learn to live with more insecurity. Terrorism is awful,but it is not yet an existential threat. And we can’t let our response to it be to shut down our open society or tear ourselves apart with recriminations. We need to keep up our guard,learn from our mistakes,but also learn to bury our dead and move on.

Finally,we need to dry up the funding for terrorist groups,and the mosques,schools and charities that support them. And that means working to end our addiction to oil. It is disgusting to listen to Republicans lecturing Obama about Afghanistan while they don’t have an ounce of courage to vote to increase the petrol tax that would reduce the money we’re sending to the people our soldiers are fighting.

I know. None of this seems very relevant right now. But it will — the day our luck runs out. New York Times