When a country is the most active state sponsor of terrorism, and its leaders routinely endorse slogans like "Death to Israel" and "Death to America," we should take it seriously when they pursue the capabilities to make their dreams a reality.

A December 2009 missile launch proved Iran has already obtained the ability to reach Israel. Given President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's and other Iranian leaders' millenarian fanaticism, it would be most imprudent to rely on nuclear deterrence alone to protect us. If Tehran were to achieve a nuclear missile capability, it could hold American cities hostage -- unless, that is, the U.S. builds a robust and comprehensive ballistic missile defense. ...

If Iran were to launch a nuclear-armed missile from a ship near one of our coasts -- say a primitive SCUD from a fishing boat -- we would have very little warning and no protection. ...

Further, if the Iranians were to detonate even a primitive nuclear warhead over the United States, it could send out an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) destroying the electric grid and electrical systems across a wide swath of U.S. territory. Iranian military writings show the mullahs recognize the potential of this kind of attack. Depending on where it occurred and how large the warhead was, an EMP attack could cause large-scale fatalities and unimaginable economic devastation. Defending against this kind of threat requires defensive systems that can intercept an attacking ballistic missile while it is still ascending. ...

Given the growing Iranian threat, the Obama administration should re-evaluate its missile-defense strategy.

An Israeli strike now -- after the rise of the Green Movement and the crackdown on it -- is more likely to shake the regime than would have a massive American attack in 2002, when Tehran’s clandestine nuclear program was first revealed. And if anything can jolt the pro-democracy movement forward, contrary to the now passionately accepted conventional wisdom, an Israeli strike against the nuclear sites is it. …

If Khamenei can suppress the Green Movement and develop a bomb, he might choose to move beyond suicide bombers and Hezbollah and Hamas rocketry in his assaults on Israel and “global Jewry.” Who would stop him? …

In Iran among the hard core, an Islamist-Marxist-Nazi brew sustains the most vicious anti-Semitic -- not just anti-Zionist -- regime ever in the Muslim Middle East. (Saudi Arabia is a close but less threatening second.) In the Islamic Republic, state-sponsored anti-Semitism, for both popular and highbrow audiences, has become ubiquitous. …

[F]or those, like the Iranian hard core, who believe this is a match-up between God and the Devil, a peace process can ameliorate nothing. …

Imagine what Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard Corps will think of the Americans, and especially the Israelis, if, after announcing repeatedly that an Iranian nuclear weapon is “unacceptable,” they permit it. …. Terrorism is never static. …

While there is no guarantee that an Israeli raid would cause sufficient shock to produce a fatal backlash against Khamenei and the senior leadership of the Guards, there is a chance it would, and nothing else on the horizon offers Israel better odds. …

Throughout the greater Middle East, frank discussions about Islam are easier to have than they are in Washington, D.C.-- especially among government officials. Ask someone in the Obama administration about jihad and, unless the official knows the conversation is off the record -- and sometimes even if it is off the record -- that official likely will become a bit panicked, nonplussed, and try to change the subject.

… Whether the invidious subject is slavery, female genital mutilation, Sharia’s draconian corporal punishments (hudud laws), women’s rights, corruption, jihadism, “oriental despotism,” or representative government, intra-Muslim ethical deliberations on most of these subjects have been provoked by Westerners and Westernized Muslims taking issue with prevailing practices. …

In the 1930s, the mufti of Jerusalem was Haj Amin el-Husseini. He, too, despised Jews -- there was not yet a state of Israel to despise. After participating in a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941, Husseini moved to Berlin. There he became Hitler’s ally, the “most important public face and voice of Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda,” in the words of historian Jeffrey Herf. …

And here we are, more than a half century later, with the current mufti of Jerusalem fabricating crimes against Muslims for which Jews deserve to be put to death. Meanwhile, Hamas leaders openly declare their intention to annihilate Israel and exterminate Jews -- claiming they, too, are acting in self-defense, and calling themselves a “resistance” movement. …

[S]ocial critic Paul Berman …recently observed that a taboo has developed: Most intellectuals determinedly ignore the fact that “Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.”

ignores the fact that the terrorist group has shown a real lack of regard for the value of life of virtually every ethnic group and nationality on the planet. …

It is doubly absurd to argue that al Shabaab is racist, since it is a Somali-led organization. Though it is true that virtually all of Shabaab's brutality has been inflicted upon Africans, this is a matter of geography: when an insurgency is based in Africa, it is a certainty that the vast majority of its victims will be Africans.

Many strong lines of criticism can, of course, be directed at al Qaeda. I need not elaborate on the fact that the organization is brutal, reprehensible, imperialistic, and totalitarian. But the notion that its attacks are uniquely anti-African is spurious, and one hopes the administration will soon abandon this disingenuous claim. …

[T]he administration's "al Qaeda is racist" comments seem uniquely American in outlook. That is, one unstated assumption underlying these remarks is that being racists might be worse than being mass murderers.

was expressed in such documents as Abu Mansoor al-Amriki’s January 2008 “A Message to the Mujaahideen in Particular and Muslims in General.” In it, Amriki proclaimed that Shabaab’s manhaj, or religious methodology, was the “same manhaj repeatedly heard from the mouth of the mujaahid shaykh Usaamah Bin Laden … the doctor Ayman ath-Thawaahiri [bin Laden’s deputy] … and the hero, Abu Mus’ab az-Zarqaawi [the late head of al-Qaeda in Iraq].”

Shabaab leaders have also been explicit in their desire to ally militarily with Al Qaeda. This was expressed, for example, in the August 2008 video “March Forth” released by Al Shabaab’s late military strategist Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, and more recently in a February 2010 statement in which Al Shabaab said that it had agreed “to connect the horn of Africa jihad to the one led by al-Qaeda and its leader Sheikh Osama Bin Laden.”

radical jihadist propaganda at our peril. Inspire [al-Qaeda’s new online magazine] is not designed for mainstream Muslim audiences who will reject its radical content. The target audience is marginal Muslims not integrated in mainstream society, as well as the disaffected young men in English-speaking countries such as the U.S. and the U.K. …

Inspire is the latest indication not just that radical Islam is still at war with the U.S., but that it's opening up a new front to recruit fringe individuals in our country and radicalize them.