Army Bob: Paris attack shows there are too many evil people in the world

by Robert M. Traxler

The attacks in Paris Nov. 13 were very predictable; indeed, this column has predicted them for in excess of a year. Most of the Islamic terrorists, if we can call them that, detonated explosives attached to their bodies rather than surrender.

The death before dishonor we see in the terrorists is reminiscent of Japanese soldiers in World War II. When we couple extreme loyalty to a political cause with religious fanaticism, we give birth to an exceptionally powerful belief system.

The Japanese soldier believed death for the Emperor God was “light as a feather;” life was a heavy burden. The radical Islamic terrorist believes death in the service of Allah will get you a ticket straight into heaven and six dozen virgin girls to keep you contented.

I attended the first of many Terrorism Counteraction courses in 1973. The lesson back then was that we cannot stop a terrorist who is determined to die for his cause. We have come to learn that it is possible, extremely difficult but possible, to prevent attacks before they happen using aggressive electronic intelligence gathering (ELINT) and human intelligence (HUMINT).

The very predictable folks on the progressive side of the divide have already started to blame the victim, the French. The French government is not as tolerant and understanding as it should be, giving the Islamic butchers no choice but to murder insolent French citizens. Thanks to all things holy we have free speech and they have the right to say unenlightened things like that, but the Islamic terrorists murder Muslims in Muslim countries for the crime of not being pious enough. No predominantly Christian country will ever pass muster in the eyes of a radical Muslim, no matter how well Muslims are treated.

Muslims have immigrated to western predominantly Christian countries of their own free will and are now killing their hosts because they lack religious purity as defined by a small minority of the followers of the book.

The French have long been a target of Islamic anger going back to the Battle of Tours or Poitiers in 732 AD when Charlemagne’s Granddad Charles Martel and his Christian army stopped the expansion of Islam into Europe. We need to understand the teachings at madrasas (Islamic schools) center on the golden days of Islam: the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. Avenging the insulting defeats visited upon the followers of the book long before the North American continent was discovered are still taught as requiring savage reprisals.

President Obama has long stated the detention center at Guantanamo Bay is a recurring tool for Islamic terrorists; it may be, but I doubt it. However, the success of the ISIS/ISIL Caliphate is an enormously useful recruiting tool for spreading the word of Allah worldwide. As said before, hundreds of radical recruits flock every day to the Caliphate, where they are trained in the art of terror and sent worldwide to await the call of Allah to jihad, as we saw in Paris.

Every government in the world needs to understand that unless they are a strict Islamic Republic on the Iranian model, they are a target of the radical Muslims who populate the ISIS/ISIL Caliphate. The civilized world needs to wake up and smell the cordite and gun powder; the Islamic Caliphate needs to be destroyed, not merely defeated, but destroyed. The Russians are now in Syria; we have forces in Iraq. We need to form an alliance with the Russians, involve all our allies and crush ISIS/ISIL.

The good folks in the most dedicated 5 percent on the left and right will violently object to this course of action, they will maintain it will not totally stop Islamic Terrorism, and they will be correct. A very large portion of the American people are tired of war but our enemies do not tire of killing us. We as a nation have been fighting these folks since 1801, 214 years, and they will not go away any time soon. However, the major blow provided by a sound punishing defeat of ISIS/ISIL will take the wind from the storm called Islamic terrorism.

The sad but clear truth is that radical Islam has been a threat for over two centuries of American history and it will be a threat for decades if not centuries to come; welcome to the old/new normal. President Obama and the progressives may believe that if we use polite language and are kind to the terrorists they will love us and not attack us; that belief is dangerously naive. It flies in the face of liberal beliefs but there are truly evil people in the world and lots of them.