The alleged bomber of the New York subway was inspired by the 2016 ISIS attack on the Berlin Christmas market, in which a Tunisian man drove a truck into a crowd and killed 12 people, according to a New York Times report. Akayed Ullah of Brooklyn saw Christmas posters in the underground corridor connecting the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the Times Square subway lines, and these set him off (or rather, inspired him to set himself off, with a pipe-bomb velcroed to his torso). The bomb—which used a broken Christmas-tree bulb as a detonator—killed no one, and footage of the aftermath suggests that its main effect was to char his midsection.
It would be foolish, I think, to make too much of the inter-religious aspects of ISIS’s target selection. ISIS hates Christians less than it hates most non-ISIS Muslims, and the things it hates about Christmas are hardly the aspects of the holiday that find expression in advertisements in the Port Authority, which are more likely to be selling Rockettes tickets than to be stressing the corporeality of a triune God. Yes, ISIS hates Christmas. But they hate everything else Americans do, too.
Once again, what deserves note is the incompetence of the attack. ISIS has issued simple instructions for mass murder, and most of those who have heeded its call have been too stupid to follow even the idiot-proof terror tactics it suggested. These are people who, if they bought a shelf from IKEA, would somehow sever both thumbs in the process of failing to assemble it. Most ISIS overseas attackers are like this. The small minority of competent ones account for nearly all the total deaths.