Horror in Chattanooga

While the facts are still emerging, the murder of four Marines at a military facility in Chattanooga, reportedly by 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who was also killed, is being investigated as an “act of domestic terrorism,” according to U.S. Attorney Bill Killian.

President Obama called it a “heartbreaking circumstance” that “appears to be a lone gunman.” He said a full probe, run by the FBI, was underway.

If evidence supports understandable suspicions that this was an act of violent jihadism, it must be called clearly and plainly by that name.

Smartly, the NYPD — which had an officer in Queens ambushed by a hatchet-wielding extremist last year — has stepped up its watch of military recruiting stations and other sensitive locations.

The horrific bloodshed came a day before the end of Ramadan, holy days during which ISIS encouraged lone-wolf attacks on the West. And it came just months after U.S. military bases raised their force protection level to Bravo, meaning an “increased and predictable threat of terrorism.”

That happened in part because an ISIS supporter, linked to a Texas attack on a Muhammad cartoon drawing contest, tweeted out the name and address of an American military officer — one of many efforts to encourage lone wolves to attack servicemen and women, and potentially their families, in their homes.

If confirmed as Islamist terrorism, Chattanooga would be far from the first such attack on soldiers and military installations inside America.

In 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 13 at Fort Hood, Tex., while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and after consulting Al Qaeda master propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki. Unacceptably, the Obama administration called it an act of “workplace violence,” so the dead and wounded were long denied honors and benefits they otherwise would have received.

Hasan’s crime came months after Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad murdered a U.S. soldier at a recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark., shortly after returning from a trip to Yemen.

As of 2013, the New America Foundation counted 21 people who had plotted to attack American soldiers or military installations.

The threat of homegrown terrorists is real and by most accounts growing. FBI chief James Comey warned: “We have investigations of people in various stages of radicalizing in all 50 states.”

Which is why Obama must continue to press for the power to break increasingly unhackable phone encryption — with proper legal safeguards.

While the facts about the latest awful slaughter are still emerging, if Abdulazeez fancied himself a soldier of Allah, we must recognize that fact.

A first step toward winning the fight we are in is acknowledging that that we are in it.