Opinion: Sri Lanka’s bombings came at a time of 'terrorism fatigue.' It’s time to break out of that.
By David Ignatius David Ignatius Columnist covering foreign affairs Email Bio Follow Columnist April 23 at 7:42 PM One disturbing aspect of the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka was that the slaughter of 321 victims came at a time when the United States is suffering what might be described as terrorism fatigue.
Terrorism is metastasizing in other ways, as militant white nationalists join the melee. Brenton Harrison Tarrant, an Australian extremist, allegedly shot and killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last month after circulating a manifesto expressing rage at migrants. Hideously, there are signs that the Sri Lankan church bombings may have been an act of revenge for the New Zealand mosque shootings — in one of those spasms of hatred that are a terrorist’s dream.
The United States has failed to learn the lesson of Sept. 11, argued Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, who was chair of the 9/11 Commission and is co-chair of USIP’s Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States. The United States took down the leadership of al-Qaeda, to be sure, just as it did later against the Islamic State.
Nations, like individual human beings, often seem condemned to make the same mistakes over and over. That’s certainly true with countering terrorism. Policymakers in the United States and allied countries understand intellectually that a safe and stable world requires reasonable governance, a public belief that some sort of rough justice prevails and enough jobs that adolescent men aren’t tempted to join terrorist groups.
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