More than 350,000 people have been killed and around $4.4 trillion spent and obligated since the war on terror began in 2001 — but the human cost and military expense have been in vain, judging from the rotten returns.
The global jihadist movement is expanding and accelerating in an apocalyptic vacuum once hailed as the Arab spring. Any doubts about its vast, ugly reach were snuffed out when a disgruntled Muslim convert allegedly beheaded a woman and stabbed another in Oklahoma last week — a grisly glimspe into a future where copycat anarchists hold court around the western world.
Radical Islam and its armies, gangs, and lone wolfs are changing the nature of conflict in the 21st century, pop-culturalizing violence, bragging on social media, and confirming our worst suspicions that this ideological war cannot be defeated with military campaigns, but through a religious and cultural reformation led by moderate Islam.
There was a time when our plans to destroy the enemy were explicit. The United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese in the final days of World War II to stop their threat to global security. Around then mainstream Germans were marched into Nazi concentration camps to face the horrors they had ignored, and then boycotted while they rebuilt their war-torn nation.
Westerners today are too detached from world dangers and too politically correct to exact such horrors. Yet Islam’s perverts are worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Nonsensical, age-old civil wars have spawned them. Personal frustrations and shortcomings have radicalized them. And a western generation of nerdy buttercups — more concerned with critiquing artisan pale ales than avenging the terrorism displacing their way of life — are keeping them in booming business. Islamo-freaks are also guaranteed a long and chilling reign in the terror twilight zone, thanks to a free world hung up on giving Islam and Muslims a pass.
The essentials are clear: President Obama must stop demonizing and demoralizing America in the final months of his lame duck administration. Social media companies must turn terror-related postings over to the authorities. The international community must track and prosecute the financiers of radical Islam. Our intelligence community needs to be reinforced. And the Muslim world must be economically sanctioned, unless it deploys its own money, muscle, and mettle to destroy the extremists.
We cannot bomb an ideology. We can, however, express our anger over radical members of “the religion of peace” replacing western ideals with their Islamic agendas, and call on Muslims everywhere to put their conscience above their faith.
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