It is a time for family and public gatherings, good cheer and holiday shopping as Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations go into high gear. But the deadly rampage at Bondi Beach in Australia highlights a phenomenon well known to counterterrorism experts: The holiday season also represents a period of heightened threat from extremist groups like the Islamic State.

“Unfortunately, the Christmas season has been a magnet for terrorists,” says Bruce Hoffman, running through a grim litany of previous Christmastide violence—airport attacks in Rome and Vienna in 1985, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988, Christmas market attacks across Europe in recent years and finally the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans that began 2025 so tragically.

Mr. Hoffman is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is the co-author, with Jacob Ware, of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.

The terror attack in Australia on Dec. 14 that claimed 15 lives renewed concerns about the reach of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Though the group may have finally been dislodged from a self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria in 2019, this latest attack on Jewish families celebrating Hanukkah is a reminder that the Islamic State retains its deadly capacity.

The world’s deadliest terror organization

The Islamic State has returned to its terrorist roots, decentralizing, diving underground and disseminating its message from dark corners of the internet. Last year it coordinated or inspired attacks in Iran and Turkey and managed a brutal assault in March that claimed the lives of 149 concertgoers in Russia. It remains the world’s deadliest terror organization. In 2024, ISIS and its affiliates were responsible for 1,805 deaths in 22 countries.

In June, a suicide bomber killed 25 worshipers at Mar Elias Church in Damascus. In Palmyra, Syria, on Dec. 15, a government security force member believed to be acting on behalf of the Islamic State ambushed and killed three Americans—two soldiers and a civilian interpreter.

After a vast sacrifice in treasure and human suffering to rid Iraq and Syria of the ISIS menace, is the United States itself any safer from an attack orchestrated or inspired by the Islamic State?

Mr. Hoffman calls the Islamic State an “ongoing threat that we have to be vigilant about,” adding that U.S. counterterrorist agencies need to pay close attention to trends abroad. Over the last week, police in Germany arrested five people who were planning an attack on a Christmas market in Bavaria. In Poland, police arrested a university student who was seeking to contact the Islamic State for help in orchestrating another Christmas market attack.

“What we need is exactly what we see overseas—a highly vigilant and very effective response that is attuned to threats, especially during holiday seasons,” Mr. Hoffman says.

Policymakers in Washington should not be under the delusion that the Islamic State has been defeated, Daniel Byman agrees. Mr. Byman is the director of the warfare, irregular threats and terrorism program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and, like Mr. Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor.

But he does believe that the terror network’s capacity and its ability to influence others has been significantly diminished since its caliphate was ended by U.S., Kurdish, Syrian and Iraqi forces. “There’s kind of an assumption that people can always become a terrorist if they want to,” he says. “But how do you train? How do you get weapons? What do you do?”

“When [terror] groups themselves are weak, they’re not providing that guidance,” he says.

That contrasts to the Islamic State of 2014, when would-be terrorists could go online and connect with ISIS fighters for guidance about targets and strategy. That kind of access is not completely impossible now, he says, but it is much harder to achieve.

Even dramatic events like the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza to dislodge Hamas did not lead to the spike in terrorist acts that many in the counterterrorism community anticipated. Instead, “people are looking for other ways to address their frustration and despair about something like Gaza,” Mr. Byman says.

“There are protest movements that get a lot of energy, so now, one way I can express my anger if I’m very pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel is to go on the street with a million other people and demonstrate. And that’s a form of action that people find fulfilling.”

Both counterterrorism experts worry that recent moves by the Trump administration have weakened the nation’s ability to counter the Islamic State. U.S. counterterrorism attention has for months been shifting toward “antifa and other radical leftist terrorist groups” or toward narcotics traffickers, now declared terrorist organizations under criteria expanded by President Donald J. Trump, according to Mr. Hoffman. That broadened terror portfolio was created at a time of professional upheaval in Washington. Mr. Byman is especially concerned about the shift away from attention to potential right-wing terror acts, which he views as a more likely domestic threat. 

Mr. Hoffman notes that “the entire top managerial level of the F.B.I. was dismissed” when Mr. Trump returned to Washington, distrustful of F.B.I. officials connected to the outgoing F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray. Mr. Hoffman is particularly concerned about the administration’s “dismantling” of programs “that were designed to identify radicalization in localities throughout the United States.”

“We’re only as good as the last terrorist attack that’s been prevented,” he says. “Terrorists are consummate opportunists. When they see an opportunity to take advantage of a gap in security, whether it’s an actual one or one that they perceive, they will act.”

Blaming immigrants for terror?

And other administration policies meant to pre-empt terrorist infiltration may not have their intended results. The White House’s response to an attack by a former C.I.A. operative from Afghanistan on National Guard members in Washington on Nov. 26 was to broaden visa and immigration bans. Now visitors and would-be immigrants from 39 countries are blocked from entering the United States.

Mr. Hoffman points out that there is little likelihood that those immigrants or visitors present any more of a threat than native-born Americans or other U.S. citizens. “Political violence in the United States isn’t the domain of any specific demographic,” he says, urging policymaking based on empirical evidence, not whim or emotions.

“The terrorism threat from legitimate immigration has been grossly overstated” is Mr. Byman’s blunt assessment. “In my view, immigrants—whether refugees or just normal economic immigrants—are very much a part of American life, part of the American tradition.”

“Look at how many major U.S. companies were founded by immigrants,” he says. “This is something we should be proud of.”

Australian officials are seeking elevated safety after Bondi through proposals to ratchet up what are already some of the strongest gun control regulations in the world. Access to firearms is obviously a worrisome aspect of America’s homegrown terror threat. The United States is awash with more than 392 million handguns, rifles and military-grade firearms.

But Mr. Hoffman cautions that addressing terror threats must go “beyond gun control to issues of societal norms and attitudes.”

“The Australian government has not faced up to the threat of antisemitism,” he says. He believes Australian security officials should have been better prepared given the years-long rise of antisemitic acts the nation has been experiencing. “This is a threat that should have been on their radar, and especially when you have a large public gathering of a thousand people on a beach,” he says.

The civilian suffering in Gaza, in a conflict itself provoked by a vast terror strike in southern Israel in October 2023, has triggered hostility to Jewish people around the world. In the United States, antisemitic incidents have been similarly on the rise.

Mr. Hoffman worries of a broad failure in U.S. and Australian society “to call out people who wage war on Jews simply because there’s an assumption they support Israel.”

“There’s been a failure to address this balance between individual free speech liberties and individual safety and public safety,” Mr. Hoffman says. The dilemma has only been heightened because of the rapid expansion of social media and its capacity to amplify messages of hate, radicalization and terror recruitment. (Australian government officials announced on Dec. 18 their intention to revisit the nation’s hate speech laws.)

Balancing free speech and public safety

According to current U.S. law, he says, speech needs to express an “imminent threat” before it may face restrictions. That is a “very high threshold,” Mr. Hoffman says. He argues, however, that demonstrations accompanied by chants like “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” represent physical threats to the Jewish community.

As threats to society evolve, he says, “our laws have to change as well,” especially as social media continues to demonstrate “the ease with which it appears to be able to summon people to violence.” He adds that in the United States, acts of homegrown political violence like the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and attempts on the president’s life have become an “enormous problem.”

“Our leaders have to tackle these issues, and they aren’t,” Mr. Hoffman complains. “They’re ducking them.”

But Mr. Byman suggests the debate over free speech and safety can be overstated. There are plenty of gray areas, but there remains a wide zone for collaboration on security that will not infringe on speech, he says.

“When social media companies are monitoring their own sites for people who are embracing violence, I don’t feel freedom is significantly diminished,” he explains. “When the F.B.I. is investigating people who make public threats against political figures, I don’t feel it’s a major diminishment of freedom.”

“We should draw a pretty bright line on support for violence,” Mr. Byman says. “On the other hand, political causes, some of which I will agree with, some of which I will not agree with, are O.K. as long as people are peaceful and they’re calling for peaceful action.”

Mr. Byman has some counsel for the Trump administration to get its counterterrorism efforts back on track: Remember that ISIS is diminished, not defeated; that government coordination with technology companies to identify potentially dangerous actors is worth restoring; and that intelligence collaboration with allies around the world remains essential.

Finally, he urges the president to resist the temptation to withdraw from global hot spots that remain hazardous to U.S. service members. “We’re going to need some military presence in places like Iraq and Syria to keep the Islamic State off-balance,” Mr. Byman says.

For the rest of us, he suggests some perspective on terrorism. Americans should be aware of terrorism but should not allow anxiety about it to rule their lives.

“I don’t want to completely diminish it,” Mr. Byman says, but he points out that people are at far greater risk each day from commonplace threats that are for the most part barely acknowledged.

Terrorist attacks shock in headlines, as they are intended to, and provide fodder for movie and television thrillers, but the real-world menace they represent is vanishingly small. “It’s something that we should all want our government to protect us from, but at the same time, we need to recognize that [though] these events happen, they’re relatively rare.”


More from America

A deeper dive

The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week.

For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week, in South Africa President Trump’s talk about white genocide stokes racial divisions and in Illinois and New York assistance in dying bills are signed into law.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).