The London bombings and other recent events have taught us a great deal about the nature of the Global War on Terrorism. Before London, our focus was overseas – at terrorists, like those who attacked on 9-11, who entered from abroad with, at the most, minimal assistance from those born and raised in this country. The “American Taliban”, John Walker Lindh, was thought to be an aberrational figure – a freak of nature, not a portent of dangers ahead.

We now know that, with minimal resources, Islamic forces reared and recruited within this country may be deployed against us and create terror and havoc with minimal cost. We all should now recognize what I have long maintained, namely that Islam is not a religion like any other: while there are millions of “Good Muslims” in this world, it is also true that the Islamic faith, in and of itself, is hateful and will, as a natural outgrowth of the practice of that faith, produce individuals, even those given every opportunity in the world by the richest and freest society in the history of the world, determined to kill in the name of Islam.

To begin, we need to be honest about the nature of the treat. While it’s true that all Muslims are not the threat, it is also true that Islam itself is the threat. This is a fine distinction, but an important one. In World War Two all Germans were not bad, or a threat, but Germany was the enemy. In the Cold War all Russians may not have been either evil or communists, but Russia was the enemy. In this war not all Muslims are bad, but Islam is the enemy. We need to be honest with the people about this simple fact.

Islam is our enemy.

We need to repeat that.

Islam is our enemy.

That is, as I have already said, not to say that all Muslims are bad, but that the threat that we face is, at its core, not the threat of “terrorism” (there are, after all, plenty of terrorists who pose no threat to us at all) but the threat posed by the ambitions of an Islamic faith which is, at the highest levels, controlled almost entirely by individuals who are either terrorists themselves, supporters of terror, or justifiers of terror.

Why are we fighting Islam, rather than “terrorism”? That’s a rather simple question: because “terrorism” is not the enemy, it is the tactic preferred by our enemies. We can no more destroy “terrorism” than we could have declared war against the Blitzkrieg. To pretend that this war is about Bin Laden and al-Qaeda alone would be akin to declaring war only on the Japanese Navy and Admiral Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor.

Islam is a very old faith, and it has seen glorious days in its past. Though all Moslems may not agree with the aims of the people who provide much of the leadership within the Islamic world, they can be fairly broadly defined.

The leaders of the dominant wing of world-wide Islam believe first that all lands ever occupied by Moslems should forever be so. The most obvious manifestations of that design are in places (like Israel, Chechnya, and the Kashmir) where Islam bumps up against other civilizations, but their territorial ambitions are not limited to these places alone. The more zealous among Islamic leaders no more seek to end their war with the recapture of these “lost territories” than Hitler meant to end his conquests with the Sudetenland. If Islam manages to win in the present-day battlefronts, they’ll move on to other areas – most notably in Europe, which Islam has sought to conquer for thirteen centuries. Already at least one of Bin Laden’s videos has begun to make menacing noises about Spain which, of course, was Islamic-occupied for centuries.

It is entirely clear to me that we are rapidly headed towards the Israelization, as the brilliant columnist Mark Steyn has dubbed it, of much of Europe. Tolerant Holland has, in recent years, been blighted by savage Islamist violence designed to suppress by murder any speech that Islamists find intolerable. Poor Theo Van Gogh, the nephew of the great man slaughtered in the streets, is the Canary in the European mine. It will not be long before the streets of Paris, Rome, Brussels, Oslo, and the other European cities who thought themselves immune from the dangers posed by this enemy – the streets of the cities of those countries who condemned Israel and America – are running with much blood.

And what, in response, will Europeans do? Will the fight, or will they run? At first glance, it seems an absurd question, but I’m not so sure. After all, the French can’t abandon Paris again, can they? What will happen when one in five, or one in four, people in France is a Moslem? And that day on which that will be a reality is coming very soon.

It will not, of course, be tomorrow, but let me point out something to you. In France today, somewhere between one in ten and one in eight people is a Moslem. That percentage is rapidly increasing. There are, at this very moment, somewhere between six million and nine millions Moslems in France. We don’t know an exact number because they live in the inner cities which have become so dangerous that, in sections, the police dare not enter without armored vehicles.

It seems entirely likely to me that, in the face of the chaos such a turn of events is sure to bring, the French elite and middle classes, those who can get out, will flee abroad, to places like Canada, Australia, and, indeed, right here to America. And they will leave behind their underclass, led by Le Pen-like thugs, to fight it out.

How will that end? I don’t know. But I don’t think that anyone can say with any certainty that, by 2050-something, France will not have become the Islamic Republic of France.

So, what is the solution? It’s simple: we need to defeat and discredit the idea of Islam as it is advancing today – “Modern Islam” if you will – and we need to replace it with a peaceful and democratic alternative.

Now, that’s easier said than done. To win requires a war fought on two fronts. It requires a war overseas, and war at home.

To win, we must take on modern Islam, and we must humiliate, destroy, and discredit it.

If we are fighting Islam, some might ask, are we fighting to destroy it? The answer to the question is no: we are no more fighting to destroy Islam itself than we fought Germany or Japan to destroy them. We are fighting Islam to end the threat is poses to us and, hopefully, to purify and reform it along the war by combining it with values imported from the Anglosphere, as we did in both Germany and Japan.

There’s a popular myth out there that terrorism is inspired by “desperation” and so on. This myth is mostly perpetuated by the left, because it ties into both their brown-people-as-victims worldview and their general belief that the government throwing away more money at undeserving people is the best way to solve any problem. Terrorism has nothing to do with desperation – terrorism is used by modern Islam because the leaders of the movement believe that they have a strong chances of being successful using it. And, if the knee-jerk appeasing tendencies of modern Democrats are to be any guide, they’re probably right.

People don’t join armies because they want to die. They join them, go to war, generally in the belief that, one way or another, they’re going to win and that, even if they don’t, they’ll bring success, honor, whatever, to their families and their loved ones.

At the same time, there are some die-hards who will fight to the death, no matter what.

We need a strategy which can deal with both of these threats.

Abroad, we’re mostly on the right track. We’ve kept on the offensive against the enemy, and we’ve killed a lot of terrorists. We should keep that up, with two major modifications.

First, we should consider adopting Israeli-policy with regard to terrorists. When we identify the homes of known terrorists, we should target them and destroy them (along with anyone who remains in them) from the air. Terrorists should be made to pay a personal price for their crimes. When their homes are accessible to us from the ground, we should evacuate and demolish them.

Second, we should establish a policy of nuclear deterrence. One of my greatest fears is that, if the terrorists do ever strike with Weapons of Mass Destruction, we won’t have a leader with the moral certainty to retaliate and that, amid pressure from all sides, we’ll back down. Instead, we should establish a system whereby we have pre-declared targets to be struck in the event of a nuclear attack against America. And, of course, Mecca should be on that list.

At home, it’s time to consider other measures to defend against terror. Specifically, there are two policies which should be put into effect.

It’s time to consider the internment of those in certain risk groups. Internments have a bad reputation because of what happened to Japanese-Americans during World War Two (something I know a great deal about). The problem is that people have taken the problems with that one internment and generalized them to conclude that all internments are bad. The Japanese internment was wrong because it interned all people, including those who posed no conceivable threat, and it resulted in the confiscation of personal property without proper compensation being paid.

Instead, we should begin a targeted internment of those most likely to pose a threat – and we should do so after investigation. Broadly, we should intern people who fall into a number of groups such as young Islamic men who’ve taken extended trips without any obvious purpose (IE – visits with close family) to nations considered terrorist havens, those who fall into a likely terrorist profile and have made pro-terrorist statements, and those identified as being directly linked to terror groups or terrorist financing groups. The overall number would not be large, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 people.

Second, it’s time to consider something which, reluctantly, I feel it necessary to endorse – universal military service on the Israeli model, but with a caveat.

We should have universal military service – for home service only. Universal Servicemen should be enrolled in a new, mega-National Guard which will be used to guard vital installations against terror, to inspect all incoming cargo, to defend our borders, and conduct other vital tasks which it’s simply impossible to conduct with a handful of law enforcement personnel.

Whatever we do, we must remember that wars are not won without innovation. Until we’re prepared to do everything necessary to defeat terror, we will continue to face the ever-present threat of sudden death in our streets.