Liberals sometimes say that law enforcement’s approach to the Mafia offers a model for how to deal with jihadists, even though the latter tend not to limit their demands to protection money. This past Sunday, Egberto Willies claimed that if terrorist attacks were “treated as they should be, like organized crime, it would neuter ISIS. After all…the group is no more powerful than a large band of thugs with weapons.”

But crimefighting methods weren’t the main concern of Willies’s piece. Rather, it was his belief that “neocons” wish to exploit fear of terrorism in order to start a war which would “transfer wealth from the masses to the few owners of the defense industrial complex.” Willies also ranted that conservatives don’t take a back seat to Islamist fanatics when it comes to lethality: “America's right-wing mass killers and gang bangers have killed more people in the West than ISIS has.”