Following the massacre on Bondi Beach earlier this month, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters that the murderers were adherents of a "radical perversion of Islam."

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett added that the men who gunned down 15 Jews, including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, were aligned with the Islamic State, which she claimed is a terrorist organization – "not a religion."

Really, mates?

It's been a generation since Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Back then, most people had no idea who Osama bin Laden was, much less what he believed.

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Every American president publishes a National Security Strategy because, as the NSS recently released by the Trump administration says, "all Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why."

The rub, of course, it that the NSS also lets America's adversaries know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why. Would a chess grandmaster tell his opponent exactly how he plans to checkmate him?

The NSS is not a "grand strategy." It can't be because, in just over three years, a new White House resident may have different priorities.

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A few months back, passengers arriving at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport walked down a sloping path to passport control flanked by dozens of posters depicting the remaining hostages Hamas had dragged into Gaza following its Oct. 7, 2023 invasion of Israel and the largest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

When I arrived in Israel earlier this month, only one poster remained: that of Ran Gvili, a 24-year-old police officer killed while attempting to defend a kibbutz from the terrorists.

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President Trump is a master multitasker. Still, while he was busy dining and deal-making with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia last week, I doubt he had time to carefully examine the 28-point "peace" plan drafted by Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, and Kirill Dmitriev, de facto special envoy of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Initially, Mr. Trump appeared to endorse the plan, saying that Thanksgiving would be "an appropriate time" for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to it.

Over the weekend, however, American and Ukrainian officials met to revise the plan in Geneva where, according to a joint White House/Ukraine statement, they made "meaningful progress."

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My beat is national security and foreign policy, so I don't usually weigh in on municipal elections. But when the world's foremost capitalist city elects a socialist mayor, I make an exception.

I'll return to the economic implications in a moment, but first let me suggest that, given what al Qaeda did on Sept. 11, 2001, you might expect New Yorkers (for at least a few generations) to choose leaders whose opposition to jihadism is unequivocal.

But that description does not fit mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. His most heartfelt concern about the terrorist attack that killed more than 2,600 people in the World Trade Towers appears to be for a relative who thereafter "did not feel safe" wearing her hijab on the subways.

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