As a matter of fact, they are Muslims …

What a surprise. 

Heavily armed Muslim terrorists shouting Allahu Akbar slaughtered a dozen people in a well-organized attack on a satirical Paris magazine as retribution for publishing cartoons and stories they found offensive to the Prophet Muhammad. One of these terrorists also shot a wounded cop in the head on their way out.    

The same magazine had been firebombed by offended Muslim terrorists three years earlier.   

In the Middle East, multiple videos have been recorded by Muslim terrorists working under the ISIS banner showing them sawing the heads off of innocent captives.  They’ve also recorded and distributed several videos of their mass executions of defenseless, bound and half-naked male prisoners.  Female prisoners, according to ISIS press releases, are handed out to loyal ISIS fighters to be wives or slaves, either of which may be sold or traded by their male owners.  ISIS also uses the promise of free captured women as wives or slaves as a recruiting tool to attract new fighters. 

Muslim terrorists from Boko Haram have killed hundreds of innocent Nigerian villagers at a time while also kidnapping their younger wives and daughters to be awarded as wives to Boko Haram fighters or sold as slaves.  They have also kidnapped young males from the same villages to become child soldiers.  In their latest attacks a few days ago it’s reported that they killed over 2,000 Nigerian villagers in a matter of a days – shooting most, but burning some to death.   

Muslim terrorists retaliated against a government crackdown and massacred children in a Pakistan school and also burned alive female teachers there in December of 2014.  

Over the years since the 1990s Muslim terrorists have blown up nightclubs in Indonesia, subway stations in the UK, cut the heads off British soldiers on a public street, killed an unarmed honor guard in Canada, blown up embassies around the world, and sent suicide bombers into restaurants, theaters and other public areas to kill and maim innocent people across the globe.  That’s just a smattering. 

And lest we forget, Muslim terrorists attacked us on 9/11 killing thousands of our fellow citizens, much to the glee of other Muslims who literally danced in the streets at the news. 

Forgive me if I have lost patience with the apologists and appeasers who constantly claim that this has nothing to do with the Muslim faith, that the culprits aren’t “really” Muslims, or that these are just random acts of violence by a few extremists.  I cannot understand how anyone can fail to see the connection.  But for those who apparently can’t, let me sum it up:

The motivations of today’s Muslim terrorists do in fact come from their faith.  They want to establish an Islamic state worldwide, implement Sharia Law in place of existing laws, and kill or convert anyone who opposes them.  They want to eliminate democracy entirely and replace it with an absolute theocracy based on a book written in the 7^th Century.  They see personal liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, diversity of faith, equality, and other Western concepts since then as abominations and affronts to Islam, so these need to be discarded in the return to the bedrock teachings of Islam.     

It’s time everyone understands and acknowledges all this.  Sure, not every Muslim is a terrorist.  Since there are more than a billion and a half Muslims worldwide the number of actual terrorists among them is statistically small.  Still, refusing to correctly define who is cutting off heads, blowing up innocent people, executing unarmed prisoners, and enslaving captured women and children – and why they are committing all these atrocities – is stupid. 

To downplay the probability that these acts are connected puts us all at risk.  They are connected, and there’s obvious cooperation among the perpetrators on a global level.   

There is also no way to negotiate with them.  There is no “compromise” or political solution possible.   That’s something else that needs to be understood by everyone. 

These murderers believe what they are doing is in the greater service of Islam, justified by the Qur’an.  To many Muslims worldwide they are heroes; defenders of true Islam against corrupting Western influences and backsliding “Muslims” in name only. Mass murder, decapitation, and enslavement are all simply necessary means to an end – the defeat of Islam’s enemies through jihad, the return of Muslims to the true faith,  and the establishment of a new world order based on the Qur’an.   

The apologists say that we are misinterpreting the isolated and random acts of a few extremists as reflective of Muslims everywhere.  “Few” seems to be the operative argument. 

However, there are now tens of thousands of heavily armed soldiers with increasingly sophisticated weaponry, computer skills, and tactics, actively recruiting thousands of additional new fighters worldwide every month. This “few” is also supported – at least in sprit – by millions of like-minded Muslim followers.  So much for a “few extremists.”

What’s the appeal to so many Muslims?  And why now? 

First, the hard and fast rules have always been there for devout Muslims; this isn’t something new, and those rules are a comfort to many Muslims in a changing world. One of the appeals of Islam is that there are clear-cut rules, unchanged for centuries, for practically everything.

As the world has become smaller because of better communications, more people have been exposed to Western culture through movies, TV shows, books and the Internet.  This hasn’t always been positive.  Devoutly religious people are often offended by what they see.  It may be acceptable in the U.S. to air a show based on slutty girls, sexual innuendo, infidelity, binge drinking, and drug abuse.  But not in more conservative countries and cultures.   

What is broadcast in primetime here every night can be deemed morally depraved in many other parts of the world.  We make jokes about adultery; other cultures stone adulterers to death.  It’s the same with revealing fashions on women, drug use, and bare breasts – we don’t get wound up about these things anymore.  Yet in some other cultures police will arrest women for not fully covering every part of their body but their eyes, and drug use is punishable by hanging.       

Like in the Muslim world. 

Our harmless entertainment is the worst pornography to others.  To many Muslims our acceptance of alternate lifestyles, sex outside of marriage, women having the same rights as men, even swimsuit events in beauty pageants, is just more evidence of our culture’s continuing slide into moral chaos, and our worship of the material over the spiritual world.  We give Muslim terrorists plenty of ammunition when it comes to drawing distinctions between Western culture and what they propose.   We wallow in it and broadcast it worldwide.     

We also arrogantly believe democratic elections are the solution to most societal ills.  With democracy, people are empowered to make changes.  So democracy must be a good thing.  Well, not everybody in the world agrees. 

Much of the world prefers predictability and stability over democracy; they’d rather be told what to do.  That’s why so many attempts to install democratic governments fail in certain regions. 

Some predominantly Muslim countries, such as Turkey and Egypt, have tried democracy.  They’ve forged more secular states and tried to suppress Islamic fundamentalism for years.  However, Islamic fundamentalists win democratic elections against more progressive and secular Muslims practically every time. 

It’s happened many times in Turkey and more recently in Egypt. In both those countries, the military has staged coups to take back power from elected Islamic fundamentalists.  In Turkey – perhaps the most progressive of the Muslim countries – it’s a repeating pattern:  fundamentalists get elected and start pushing a theocracy; the military overthrows them and promises new elections; after a while new elections happen and fundamentalists get elected again.  And so on.

To think that fundamentalists make up a very small part of the Islamic faith is a serious mistake.  Islam by its nature and design is a conservative belief system tilted more toward fundamentalist rather than moderate interpretation. The major schisms in Christianity are over literal versus figurative interpretations of the Gospels of Jesus Christ.  The major schisms in Islam are over who should have been in charge after the death of Muhammad – there’s much less quibbling among Muslims over how to interpret the Qur’an. 

To devout Muslims, Islam is the only true faith. There is but one God and His name is Allah.  Muhammad is the final Prophet sent by Allah.  The Qur’an tells them that every other faith is a sham. Followers of other faiths are essentially heretics and have but three choices:  convert to Islam; or pay a tax to support Islam; or be killed.  That’s pretty much it, according to the Qur’an. 

There’s no parallel to that in the statements attributed to Jesus. 

Does the “convert, pay tax, or die” all sound familiar? Yes, it’s the same theme from the Muslim terrorists in Boko Haram and ISIS today.  Only they usually skip over the convert or pay tax part and jump right to the kill option. 

Apologists cannot walk back from is what’s in the Qur’an.  They struggle when interviewed on TV about whether the “few extremists” are “misinterpreting” the Qur’an about jihad, taking captives as slaves, or attacking and killing the enemies of Islam.  They try to change the subject, because they know the Qur’an explicitly condones all those things. 

Granted, the Bible has some gruesome passages as well.  The Old Testament God could be particularly testy and brutal – think Abraham, Noah, Job and what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah.  However, most of today’s Jews and Christians have accepted that the Bible can’t always be taken literally and while considered divinely inspired it was not actually written by God.

It’s not the same with devout Muslims and the Qur’an.

Muslims regard the Qur’an as the only unpolluted and uncorrupted word of Allah, delivered by the Archangel Gabriel directly to Muhammad.  So the Qur’an and Allah’s word are one and the same.  There’s no wiggle room.  According to the Qur’an, slavery is okay, it’s okay to slaughter Islam’s enemies who refuse to submit to His will, and there’s a special place in Paradise – an exalted level – for martyrs who die in battle on behalf of Islam.  Inshallah. 

That’s one reason Muslim terrorists have little difficulty getting folks to strap on suicide vests.  It’s a holy war to them.  Die as a martyr and go to Paradise.   

Modern Western civilizations have a hard time addressing or even thinking about becoming engaged in what might be seen as a holy war.  Especially against Muslims, given what happened in the Crusades to reclaim the Holy Land.

Moreover, we don’t know how to fight terrorists who don’t fear – but actually welcome – their own death.  We also can’t understand celebrating the enslavement of others, much less the slaughter of innocent and defenseless people as an act of faith.  It’s as if tribes of barbarians from the distant past suddenly appeared in this century, armed with today’s sophisticated weapons, focused on eradicating all vestiges of what they view as a corrupt and decadent Western civilization.    

Make no mistake:  that’s what this is about.  It’s not about religion and which version of God you worship.  It’s about cultures.  It’s about Muslim terrorists’ desire to have rules and laws from the 7^th Century imposed on a world they see as depraved, immoral, and out of control.   

Like it or not, we’re in a real war, with real weapons and real casualties, against a variety of groups and individuals tenuously bound together solely by their hatred of other cultures they view as morally and spiritually weaker than their own. 

We hear a lot about ISIS, Al Qaeda, AQAP, Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban, and Boko Haram as if these are separate and have nothing in common. Part of this is politics – taken individually, Obama and others can downplay the bigger threat. That’s really why Obama and his spokespuppets won't use the words “Muslim” or “Islamist” when describing these terror groups.   

To concede that they share a common goal – which they do – is to admit that we are essentially clueless on how to deal with this threat. 

Which we are. 

Today’s Muslims terrorists have their eyes on the long term.  The terror events we are experiencing now are just a wakeup call; a recruiting tactic and call to arms for Muslims everywhere to join their cause in a mighty jihad against a world that’s lost its bearings, slid into moral depravity, and turned away from the one true faith.

It’s their way of proving to the rest of the world, and to other Muslims, that they have nothing to fear from Western powers like the U.S. and its European allies.  Our leaders are impotent, and our militaries are useless against them, they claim, and so far they’re right.  They use the West’s reluctance to engage them directly in battle as a sign of weakness. 

The truth is, they actually want us to go into a full-scale war with them.  They reason that this will cause the billion and a half Muslims worldwide to join them in defense of Islam against the infidels in the final holy war predicted in the Qur’an. 

They think they are setting a trap for us from which they will ultimately emerge victorious. 

It’s long past time to call their bluff.  We need to kill all the Muslim terrorists now, not one at a time or in small groups with drones, but with an onslaught of real weapons, real bombing campaigns, and yes, real boots on the ground. 

We need to cauterize the areas they now control to stop the spread of their infection. 

It’s time to drop the political correctness and recognize that yes, indeed, these are Muslim terrorists.  They may also be radical extremists and radical Islamists, but they are Muslims first and foremost.  And they are following basic tenets of Islam that apply to all Muslims.   

That means we can’t close our eyes and pretend that Muslims in our military, in our communities, and around the world are immune to the appeal of an Islamic society based on the Qur’an.  Just because someone publicly opposes the terrorists’ tactics doesn’t mean they don’t also privately agree with what they are trying to accomplish.  

The first step is to identify the Muslim terrorists for what they are.  Muslim terrorists.

The longer we avoid doing that, the weaker we look in their eyes.  And our weakness only invites them to launch more terror attacks and recruit greater numbers of followers.