How to Defeat Terrorism

I admit at the outset that my title is partially misleading. Terrorism cannot be defeated, it can only be significantly reduced if the right measures are adopted. We are engaged in a war without end, a war that has gone on for fourteen centuries, a war that cannot be decisively won—but it is a war that we need not lose. We can limit the enemy’s ability to strike, keep him on the defensive, degrade his arsenal and confine him as far as possible to the peripheries of our world.

The necessary measures are not difficult to discern, but unlikely to be applied so long as our leaders are either weak or suborned, the media circulate their usual obfuscations, the academy persists in its ideological corruption, the talking heads keep talking before repairing to the security of their gated communities and tony neighborhoods, and the general populace remains mired in its habitual lassitude and fear of sounding politically incorrect.

The measures and policies that would need to be put in place are so obvious that the failure to implement them is nothing but a sign of lethal complacency and moral cowardice. What are these measures? The list is not unduly long and, as I say, entirely obvious.

• Islamic immigration must be drastically curtailed if not completely stopped. As Donald Trump has cogently warned, “We are allowing people into our country who we have no idea where they are, where they’re from, who they are, they have no paperwork, they have no documentation, in many cases.” This, as the proverb goes, is like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. But there are many more horses in the barn to be confined to their stalls. It’s a start.

• Since large Muslim populations are already settled within our borders, surveillance must be intensive, methodical and ongoing. No-Go Zones must be pacified by whatever means, and must be made Go Zones. Self-regulated ghettoes have to be opened up and rigorously policed. Islamic law must be ruled in contravention of common law and legally prohibited. Vigorous action is required. As Andrew Bieszad, one of Walid Shoebat’s co-bloggers, reported at com, the mayor of Calais has now decided to act, to dismantle the so-called refugee “jungle” that has disfigured the town and to displace or deport thousands of its characteristically violent denizens. As Bieszad says, “It has taken a long time, but the French are finally pushing back against the Muslims in Calais.” But nowhere else, it appears.

• All mosques, which are effectively command centers, must be stringently investigated and many must be closed down.

• Every imam in the country should be thoroughly vetted and many should be de-licensed and restricted from preaching.

• Jihadi suspects clearly and unequivocally known to law enforcement agencies should not be so readily allowed, as is far too often the case, to mix freely among the people. As has often been said, lone wolves are usually known wolves. Moreover, it is a mistake to consider them as “lone”; they are really part of a vast ideological pack. Of course, we would need to protect ourselves against abuse of authority where anyone in disfavor with policing agencies or political administrations can be randomly detained. Wolves may be responsibly “tagged,” so to speak, and monitored, whether digitally or in propia persona, by the intelligence community, with a reasonable prospect of interception before yet another outrage is committed—those like the Nice jihadist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who, as The Washington Post reports, “had been connected to assault and theft since 2010” and sentenced to a six month prison term (though “[i]t was not clear whether Bouhlel served any of that sentence”). Admittedly, there is a fine line between liberty and security, the issue will always remain moot, and safeguards will have to be agreed upon even if we lose some battles along the way.

• Muslims and non-Muslims who leave the country to fight alongside terrorist entities must not be repatriated, even if they are passport-holding citizens. They are accessories to those who would destroy us and are therefore enemy combatants.

• Muslim organizations with ties to terror-sponsoring organizations or that lobby for Sharia or for cultural and political influence must be disbanded and outlawed, no matter how powerful and widespread.

• No less important, indeed, perhaps the most crucial of the measures I am proposing, has to do with terminology and the concepts it signifies. We keep hearing that the enemy we are facing is “Islamic extremism” or “radical Islam.” Nothing can be further from the truth. This is the most serious in its consequences of the evasions we practice and one that ensures our eventual destruction. The enemy is not radical Islam but Islam pure and simple. The terrorists, their enablers and the “entry” cohort take their warrant from their holy scriptures—the Koran, the Hadith, the Sira, the schools of jurisprudence, and centuries of political and religious commentary.

As Jeff Sanders writes in an article for PJ Media, “The ‘holy war’ in the Bible is limited to only one set of passages in the Old Testament… [and to a particular] piece of geography and that particular time period….God did not ever tell the Israelites to go conquer and take the land of the Egyptians or the Syrians or the Greeks or the Babylonians or anyone else. And they didn’t.…However, the commands in the Quran to make war on all unbelievers have no ‘sunset clause.’ All of these commands are open-ended. They are not limited in any way to any geographical boundaries or to a time period. They are for all faithful Muslims for all time.”

As for the smattering of peaceful and tolerant passages, “the Quran also teaches something called the ‘law of abrogation,’ [in which] a later revelation, if it contradicts an earlier one, must be obeyed (Surah 2:106)…So, those few peaceful and tolerant passages in the Quran [are] replaced with other, newer commands, [which are] not so peaceful and tolerant.” Few “experts,” commentators, intellectuals and lay people are ready to endorse so unpalatable a truth. It is far easier for them to accept the conventional pieties, to regard themselves as correct-thinking and enlightened beings, and to redefine pusillanimity as courage.

In summation, until we recognize that Islam itself—not only its presumably “radical” variants—is incompatible with pluralistic Western democracies, we will not be able to save our countries. Pushback is unlikely for some time yet, if ever. Notwithstanding, peaceful Muslims must be pressured by informed opinion to undertake a thoroughgoing transformation of their faith even if the result has little affinity with millennial orthodoxy. The liberal argument that, in so doing, we will drive the moderates into the arms of the radicals is a reductio ad absurdum and, as Milo Yiannopoulos pointed out in an interview with a typical mealy-mouthed British journalist, is actually a threat. Must we keep assuring these putative moderates that Islam is demonstrably a religion of peace in order to keep them moderate? “Be nice to us or we’ll kill more of you,” as Yiannopoulos puts it. Must we refrain from fighting an implacable foe at the risk of finding ever more of them? Is this how we respond to Christians, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs? Such an argument is patently a confession of defeat and guarantees yet more of the same.

Should the measures I and others are recommending be instituted, Islam will not go away, and innocent people will still die in terrorist attacks or find their everyday lives to some extent imperiled by Islamic social and cultural incursions, although to a much diminished degree. Nevertheless, there is no other resolution to our dilemma, failing which the sequel is eminently predictable: the grizzly march of terrorist atrocities like those we have seen since 9/11 (and before) up to the latest carnage in Nice, dramatic Muslim inroads into the culture, eventual civil conflict and armed skirmishes on the streets of our cities, the rise of fascist parties profiting from the general malaise, and the inevitable disintegration of a way of life that we have ignorantly taken for granted.

“There needs to be an admission that we are in a full-scale war—not just lip-service,” Robert Spencer writes, “but a genuine acknowledgment, followed by a genuine war footing, and an end to the weepy memorials, empty condemnations, and po-faced get-nowhere investigations. This is not crime. This is war.”

We are now at the inflexion point. Either we are prepared to continue being slaughtered like sheep and to lose our ancestral traditions of rights and freedoms, or we are determined to preserve our Judeo-Christian heritage and the best the West has to offer.

Choose.