One day after Cornell’s arrest Belgian authorities took down a group they believed was plotting imminent attacks, resulting in a battle with the suspects who opened fire with military weaponry and handguns. Two of the suspects were killed. Some members of the group had reportedly returned from fighting in Syria with ISIS.
The two cases could hardly be more different. In Ohio, we saw the arrest of a classic lone wolf allegedly inspired by ISIS with aspirations to carry out an attack but scant capabilities, while in Belgium we saw the takedown of what appears to have been an ISIS cell with serious capacities for attack.
This contrast can also be seen if we carefully analyze the tactics and characteristics of last week’s Paris attacks and compare them with the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
In Paris jihadist terrorists killed 17 people in a series of attacks, beginning with the assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, followed by the killing of a policewoman and a hostage-taking in a kosher grocery. The attacks received sustained global media coverage throughout the three days that they unfolded.
In addition to the three shooters, at least a dozen others are suspected of some kind of involvement in the Paris attacks.
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Given this history, it would be unwise to ignore Holder’s warnings of the potential of Paris-like attacks inside the United States. However, there are real differences between the scale of the threat from terrorists in the United States compared with the scale of the threat in France, and American policymakers and commentators should be careful to make those differences clear when speaking to the public.
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