It's Time to Actually Fight the War on Terror | Eastern North Carolina Now

    It's hard for a nation to win a conflict that it pretends doesn't exist, just like it's hard for a boxer to win a fight half-heartedly. Right now, the United States is a world champion who thinks that holding his hands down at his waist, tossing out the occasional jab and clumsily trotting around the ring is enough to win. Radical Islam, on the other hand, is a pesky fighter without much skill. However, a willingness to commit suicide if it means damaging the "crusader coalition" makes radical Islam dangerous, even to a nation as powerful as the United States.

    The American people had several more tastes of terror this past weekend. In Minnesota, twenty two year old Dahir Adan stabbed nine innocent civilians in a shopping mall. ISIS soon after reported that the young man was a "soldier" for their cause, taking responsibility for the attack. Thankfully, Adan was killed by an armed off-duty police officer before he could hurt anyone else. In Manhattan, a pipe bomb set by Afghan American Ahmad Khan Rahami injured twenty nine and was found to be in connection with several other planted bombs, including one that went off at a Veteran's 5k race in New Jersey. After a fierce shootout with police, Rahami was taken into custody. What makes this attack most frightening is the lingering uncertainty about whether or not he was working alone, leaving open the possibility that there is an active terror cell in the United States.

    To be fair, we shouldn't forget that the battle against terror is a difficult one to fight, particularly at home. Walking the line between civil liberty and national security is always contentious, and leaning too far to one side or the other can bring about unintended consequences that no one wants. That concession aside, it must be noted that what we are doing now is pathetic. Both at home and abroad, a combination of rampant political correctness and incompetence in the upper levels of government is throttling any chance we have at legitimately fighting terror. Both Rahami from the New York bombings and Omar Mateen, the perpetrator in the Orlando shooting, were on the FBI terror watch list at some point. We all know what happened with them. The neighbors of the San Bernardino shooters noticed strange behavior but failed to report it because they feared being accused of racial profiling, according to the Daily Mail. Fourteen people died and more were injured at the hands of these terrorists and their greatest aide, P.C. culture.

    It is about time we face the facts. Despite what President Obama or some wacked out Sociology professor will argue, there is only one active religion on this planet that has people chopping off heads in its name, and it is Islam. I know that there are plenty of peaceful people who practice Islam in some form and I have no interest in any movement that encourages the religious persecution of these types of people. Every American should value the sacred freedom of religion, so long as it is not used as a justification for physically harming another. However, it's time to stop pretending that we can coddle terrorists into changing their mind about the west. The ideology of radical Islam has to be thoroughly annihilated or more innocent people across the globe will die meaningless deaths, including Americans.

    This means we have to treat the war on terror like an actual war. This means suspending immigration from terror hot-spots in the Middle East and asking for unprecedented vigilance among our Counter-terrorism forces at home. The fear of being labeled a 'racist' or 'xenophobe' needs to stop getting in the way of people reporting suspicious activity and stop preventing effective law enforcement. No more threats can be allowed to slip through like Mateen and Rahami did. Abroad, it means the thorough destruction of the Islamic State through aggressive and decisive military action, starting with a Congressional declaration of war. I will concede that the situation in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, is far from black and white. That, however, is no excuse for inaction and weakness on our part. Whether we like it or not, we live in a unipolar world with only one true superpower. If the United States doesn't act to end this threat, it's hard to imagine anyone will.