The Failed Synagogue Bombers

The arrest last Wednesday of four would-be terrorists at the scene of an attempted synagogue bombing in Riverdale shook some communal nerves. Briefly, the as-yet unrealized nightmare of a full-fledged American synagogue bombing seemed real, and the countermeasures employed by major New York synagogues seemed insubstantial. The story changed quickly, however. The bombs that the men had planted were duds provided by the FBI, and an FBI informant had been party to the conspiracy from its start. The arrests represented not the last-minute foiling of a serious plot, but culmination of an elaborate sting. There was little chance that this group could have carried out an actual attack.

This hasn’t stopped some critics from taking the incident as a sign that synagogues need to ramp up their security arrangements. They argue that the fact that this cell had the desire to carry out a synagogue bombing means that they constituted an imminent physical threat, and indicates that there are others who will be more able to act on that threat. As Jeffrey Goldberg writes, it is “Only a matter of time until an American synagogue is blown up.”

At the JTA, Ami Eden writes that “It’s fair to say that without the help/prodding of the FBI informant these guys probably would have never have pulled off a major strike — on their own, they were not going to pull off the next 9/11. Or even blown up a synagogue. But, as this list indicates, it doesn’t take much brainpower, skill or access to sophisticated weaponry to produce a tragedy.”

I’m not so sure. The question of the degree to which terrorists acting independently of organized terrorist networks constitute a serious threat is currently the subject of significant academic debate. Specifically, terrorism theorists wonder whether widely available bomb making instructions can be used successfully by independent terrorists to carry out devastating attacks. In an unpublished May 2009 report by Jeffrey M. Bale, the director of the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, titled “Jihadist Cells and “I.E.D.” Capabilities In Europe: Assessing The Present And Future Threat To The West,” Professor Bale concludes,

…small groups of amateurs without tangible connections to experienced terrorist groups are unlikely to be able to carry out sustained campaigns of IED attacks over a significant period of time, even if they do successfully manage to launch one or two very destructive attacks. In general, their built-in limitations in terms of access to resources and technical capabilities, coupled with serious probable deficiencies in tradecraft, will act to seriously inhibit their operational effectiveness, including their ability to carry out an extended series of IED attacks…This is not, however, a certainty, since such amateur groups may by unusually lucky or simply end up making less egregious blunders than their counterparts in the security forces. Moreover, if even one cell member happens to possess the requisite levels of bomb-making experience or expertise, the group may be able to pull off one or more bloody attacks despite its general lack of professionalism. In such a context, serendipity often plays a role….[I]in at least a few cases, amateur “bunches of guys” without any connections to foreign terrorist networks, and thus relatively deficient in terms of resources and expertise, will nevertheless succeed in perpetrating bloody mass casualty attacks with IEDs. After all, the historical record provides examples of just such attacks. That is the bad news.

However, that same historical record has repeatedly revealed…that as yet there have been very few actual examples of successful attacks, IED or otherwise, being carried out in the West by unconnected, fully autonomous cells composed entirely of amateurs. Indeed, such a characterization of the recent and present jihadist threat is in my opinion largely a myth or, to put it another way, a “ridiculous distortion.”

None of this contradicts the notion that American Jews may have cause to be concerned about foreign jihadi organizations targeting American synagogues in acts of international terrorism. But the fear to which Eden refers – that unskilled, unaffiliated terrorists like those in the Riverdale case could carry out a damaging attack against a Jewish target – can be easily overblown. The list of incidents to which Eden links is certainly sobering, but it’s striking that only three Jews have been killed in anti-Semitic attacks in the United States since 1994, two of whom were Israeli.

The Riverdale bombers were troubling, but let’s not rush to assume that a carefully controlled FBI sting has broad implications for synagogue security.