THE CURRENT Issue 677 · September 13, 2017

What’s Our Plan?

The war on terror will be won by persistence and resilience. And it will be lost by wishful thinking,The Rose Report: What's Our Plan? ,The war on terror will be won by persistence and resilience. And it will be lost by wishful thinking

By Binyamin Rose

Editor 4 min read September 13, 2017

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Israeli mentalist Lior Suchard at the annual event for foreign journalists, marking the new year, in Jerusalem, on January 10, 2018. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

T he destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11 2001 remains the most heinous terrorist attack of our era. The seeds of that atrocity were planted 73 year earlier when Hasan al-Banna a 22-year-old Egyptian school teacher founded the Muslim Brotherhood. His goal was to reestablish the Muslim caliphate that collapsed in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

Call them the Muslim Brotherhood al-Qaeda or ISIS. The formula for all these terror groups is the same each one following a multistep process designed to restore the caliphate says Dr. Eitan Azani deputy executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya.

The formula is: Emigrate to new lands. Establish congregations. Destabilize the new homeland. Consolidate forces. Reinstate the caliphate.

While this hasn’t come to fruition yet anywhere in the world terror groups are avidly recruiting jihadists who will work toward those goals says Dr. Boaz Ganor the ICT’s executive director. “They have a strategy and money and they are buying hearts and minds ” says Dr. Ganor.