Terrorist attacks are not intended to make us stop what we are doing; they are intended to make us do the worst that we are doing and do it more.

The aim of terrorism is not to bring the “other” to surrender, but to bring the “other” to become the thing it despises the most: to become indistinguishable from the terrorists.

This is why 9/11 was an unqualified success for al Qaeda. Not because of the people it killed — we slaughter far more on an annual basis with our own guns than died the one time in those towers.

9/11 was an unqualified success for the terrorists because it convinced us to become even worse than they were.

I suspect — though I can offer no other evidence than such grasp of human psychology as I possess — that the ultimate purpose of the Paris attacks was to create exactly the hysteria toward refugees that it created.

ISIL’s primary resource is NOT the oil it sells on the black market, but the people it controls, enslaves, and terrorizes. The flood of refugees was hemorrhaging that primary resource. They may now have effectively stopped that.