The 'Je suis Charlie' moment

Let January 2015 mark the moment when the world got serious about defeating Islamic jihadist terrorism.

Those three words are chosen purposefully: Islamic jihadist terrorism is a brand of evil that springs from the madrassas and mosques inciting Muslims to go to war against infidels the world over. It may not speak for all Muslims but it springs from the bowels of their institutions. It targets Christians and Jews, but also fellow Muslims who don’t buy its requirement to live in a world without music and kites, who balk at the notion of strapping explosives on 11-year-old boys, or who happen to be Shiites or otherwise out of step with an ideology built on violence, whose adherents regularly invoke the Quran.

The world has been waiting for a leader of the free world to make the stakes plain. That used to mean a Republican or Democratic president of the United States, but no more. White House press secretary Josh Earnest told a reporter, “This is not a matter of the world being at war with Islam” but with “these individuals who are terrorists.”

It’s worth noting the Bush administration also had a hard time identifying its “war on terror” as a war against “Islamic” terrorists.

Instead we’ve heard the menace properly called out by a French socialist and a retired former Democratic senator. On Jan. 10 Prime Minister Manuel Valls said France was in “a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”

When that movement is bent on beheading our people, crushing our friends, and destroying our society, is that not war?

The following week former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed the world must go on the offensive against “radical Islamists” who “long ago declared war on the West, but most of the nations targeted or threatened have not yet declared war against them.”

Our cover story describes the reach and scope of Islamic terrorism in one deadly week’s time, highlighted by the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo. A close examination of seven days’ events over four continents reveals a movement—not “individuals”—linked by common ideology, fraternal training, and shared goals. When that movement is bent on beheading our people, crushing our friends, and destroying our society, is that not war?

Sporadic airstrikes alone, we’ve seen again and again, cannot defeat an enemy. They are defensive, while a strategy designed for offense involves first winning back territory everywhere Islamic terrorists have claimed it—in Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, Libya, and Central African Republic to start. This is a world war, and if you recall, that’s what world wars look like.

One of the silver linings to President Obama’s passive-aggressive foreign policy is that the alliance is forming without us. Keep in mind that France successfully routed al-Qaeda insurgents in northern Mali in 2013. But the alliance needs our leadership, it needs NATO. Besides European nations now seized with the threat, it must include, as Lieberman points out, leading Islamic nations with a stake in defeating the terrorism that goes by their name: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. We can work with those states despite their human rights abuses, but we don’t have to ignore them à la Roosevelt with Stalin.

The strategy will require sacrifice for average Americans. And yes, Muslims in the West may see their own freedoms curtailed. What they can do to prevent or minimize that is to begin forcefully in word and deed separating themselves from the ideology that’s plotting world war in their name. If they do that, they may one day see themselves mainstreamed into Western life. When was the last time someone pointed out to you a German-American or Japanese-American as somehow “other”?

If non-jihadist Muslims don’t find their courage, if they allow clerical and political leaders to forever play the victim card in this business, they will forever be consigned to second-class citizenship, caught under a cloud of suspicion.

The fight is on, and we may opt to continue playing defense, but then we must expect it soon on our streets in broad daylight, as in Paris and Verviers.

Email mbelz@wng.org