Israel is girding for the worst and acting on the assumption that fighting between Israel and Iran, or between Israel and Iran’s regional proxies, could break out at any time. Michael Oren writes that it’s not hard to imagine how it might arrive. “The conflagration, like so many in the Middle East, could be ignited by a single spark. Israeli fighter jets have already conducted hundreds of bombing raids against Iranian targets in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Preferring to deter rather than embarrass Tehran, Israel never comments on such actions. But perhaps Israel miscalculates, hitting a particularly sensitive target; or perhaps politicians cannot resist taking credit. The result could be a counterstrike by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel’s air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah, Tel Aviv’s equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale exchanges, the real war would begin.”

The Islamic State indulged in some of the most ostentatious brutality and sadism of recent decades. If any extremist group deserves the adjective evil, this would be it. But it is precisely our disgust, which ISIS has well earned, that makes it difficult to talk about what the group was and what it meant—and what it may still mean. Shadi Hamid writes that it is understandable that some fear that talking about ISIS in terms of how it governed rather than how many it killed might provide it with a sheen of legitimacy after the fall of the group’s so-called caliphate. “The notion that we should call ISIS the worst names we can muster and leave it at that is to set ourselves up for future failure. And that is worth worrying about, since there will be attempts to replicate ISIS’s governance model in the coming decades,” Hamid writers.

For nearly two decades, American leaders have stressed the need to address the root causes of terrorism. More often, though, they focus on something else: killing terrorists. Much like the end of the territorial caliphate, Baghdadi’s death won’t end the group as a whole, or the threat it poses. The so-called kingpin strategy of pursuing terrorist leaders to defeat the groups they lead has had mixed results historically. So why does the United States pour so many resources and risk so many lives in pursuit of such dubiously effective ends? “The kingpin strategy provides instant gratification, and of course [addressing] root causes is something … that takes years if not decades,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, said.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the hirsute rapist whom hundreds of thousands of Islamic State supporters considered their absolute leader, died Saturday during a U.S. military raid in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province. His death will definitively end an era that had already, in a sense, ended, if not with a whimper then with an inglorious bleating of complaints from his own flock. For years now, the hardest thing for outsiders to understand about the Islamic State has been its ability to inspire—to get some Muslims to leave comfortable circumstances to fight and die. For the past year, even as the world has diverted its attention from ISIS, the group’s ability to inspire has been severely diminished, and almost no one is leaving home to die for ISIS, or choosing to die in suicide attacks for ISIS at home. The inspiration is gone, and the party is over, for now. And although Baghdadi has obtained the martyrdom he sought, he got it in the end not as a caliph but as just another bloody hairball in a pile of rubble.

“Normalization” is a term that we have come to associate with domestic violence: the victim begins to think of abuse as a part of everyday life. Paulina Neuding writes that explosions have become so normalized in Sweden that SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of the BBC, did not even mention the three explosions in the country’s capital on its national news program that evening. The explosions were left to the local news. Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University, has warned that the situation has become so dire that the integrity of the Swedish state is in jeopardy. “The state’s monopoly on violence, the actual token of a sovereign government, has been hollowed out bit by bit and no longer exists,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “The armed criminal violence is having effects that are increasingly similar to those of terrorism.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, recently gave a highly promoted speech about the importance of protecting freedom of expression online—which was immediately criticized as taking too binary a view of the issues and presenting a false choice between free expression and Chinese censorship. Evelyn Douek writes that by contrast, David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the freedom of opinion and expression, in a 9 October report, offered a very real reckoning with the trade-offs involved in protecting free speech while dealing with the real harm caused by some forms of expression, and is an attempt to find guiding, consistent standards. “There is still a lot of work to be done, not least by the companies themselves, to make this a reality,” Douek writes. “But this latest report will be a useful and influential guide in that process.”

The so-called patriot movement is grabbing headlines once again, as its members pledge to protect Trump supporters at the president’s campaign rallies across the country. The patriot movement is a fragmented and fractious coalition of groups that distrust the federal government. Members believe the government is impeding their rights and liberties – but the movement is not monolithic, and it less black and white. Despite public perceptions, few members of the various appeared to be mentally ill or outwardly racist. Instead, their grievances and principles stem from a range of motivations, personal circumstances and political philosophies.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Thomas Haldenwang, the director of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, discusses the new threat of extremism in the wake of the Halle attack and his agency’s need for greater authority in the monitoring of such threats. “What’s new is the international dimension,” Haldenwang said. “Right-wing extremism as we know it was long a particularly German phenomenon. But now, we see Anders Breivik in Oslo, Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, Patrick Crusius in El Paso, the perpetrator in Halle. It’s like links in a chain, almost an international competition. Another insight is that it appears that no deep ideology is needed to radicalize and develop plans for attacks. All that’s needed is this emotion, hate, incitement, the web-based instigation and this convergence of people who, on the basis of simplistic messages often rooted in fake news, arrive at this world view and think they have to strike immediately.”

Just as policymakers have been slow to acknowledge and act upon the threat of domestic CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) terrorism, timely research on the issue is scarce as well. Ricin is one of the more dangerous agents of domestic terror. As government agencies acknowledge the threat domestic terrorism poses, policymakers and law enforcement should take ricin seriously as a potential weapon.