Required Reading

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is almost always Required Reading, though perhaps never so much as right now.

Here she is in today’s WSJ on the Long War:

Even if ISIS is completely destroyed, Islamic extremism itself will not go away. If anything, the destruction of ISIS would increase the religious fervor of those within Europe who long for a caliphate.

European leaders must make some major political decisions, and perhaps France can lead the way. A shift in mentality is needed to avoid more terror attacks on an even bigger scale and the resulting civil strife. Islamic extremists will never succeed in turning Europe into a Muslim continent. What they may well do is provoke a civil war so that parts of Europe end up looking like the Balkans in the early 1990s.

Here are three steps that European leaders could take to eradicate the cancer of Islamic extremism from their midst.

It’s scary as hell when someone as sharp and as experienced as Ali is making the same case about Europe that I have for the last ten years — so read the whole thing already, especially her second step about the “battle of ideas.”