I was driving to work in my police car considering what I had just told several groups of Americans during a round of public speeches I was giving around Veterans Day. I had spoken to them about terrorism, a topic that I studied for the bulk of my master’s degree and something I learned about a lot more intimately during my time in Iraq, Israel and Palestine. I couldn’t help but wonder when the next terrorist attack would happen, then if it would be on my watch as a law enforcement officer. Believe it or not, I was envisioning mass casualties in coordinated bombings and shootings, just as I heard what happened in Paris.
France has seen its fair share of terrorism and hostage attacks lately. These same kinds of attacks later occurred in Texas, regarding cartoon drawings of the Muslim prophet. Gunman shot and people killed; bombs and improvised explosives decimating crowds as well. Really, it has not been a question of whether the fight has spilled over into the West for some time. It has. The better questions are what has led to this and how will America fair?
France has a huge amount of Islamic expats from the Maghreb (the northern African continent) as well as the Middle East. The same type of growth in Muslim population has occurred in Spain, Germany and the U.K.
Of course, London and Spain have faced Islamic terror attacks in the last decade or so, and Germany was home to the 9/11 attackers for a time.
The first thing I think about when I hear that the U.S. is welcoming Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees into our shores is how unsafe that is.
America already has enough random wackos and murderers. We don’t need Boston Marathon bombers or jihadists and salafits who would love to give their lives by becoming shaheed (martyrs).
I hope we’re still not as clueless as we were on Sept. 10, 2001. In fact, in 1998 UBL and others signed the fatwa (religious edict) against the US, essentially declaring war on us. Al Qaeda then successfully attacked US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania, and blew up the USS Cole. “The base” (that’s what al Qaeda literally means) also brainstormed and ran a test run to bring down commercial airplanes during the 1995 Bojinka Plot. They were clear and present dangers to the US.
ISIS recently lined up 200 kids and shot every one of them. They murdered them. Meanwhile, there are those in the US who still complain that interrogators ever did something like waterboarding. Let me tell you what: I have dozens of friends who were waterboarded in SERE school and they are still walking around today. What we don’t do is capture people and film ourselves cutting their heads off.
Western culture needs to wake up. When it comes to Islamic terrorism, we need to get prepared because more is coming our way. We need to consider a premortem exam and then work backwards to figure out how to best stop it. Perhaps we need leaders to be like the mayor of Jerusalem who recently encouraged all of his constituents to carry firearms.
Are we really prepared to fight Islamic terrorists like the attackers in Paris when, as a culture, we are bending over backwards to emasculate and decimate our police forces? We need more cops, not less. But culturally, who wants to be a cop when cops so often get eviscerated by the media?
We need more SWAT teams to be able to respond to multiple simultaneous attacks, but liberals say our SWAT teams need to be more like unarmed negotiators instead of militarized operators. In truth, we need tanks for ballistic protection and we need to fight smarter and harder.
We need stores, restaurants and schools that support concealed and open carry. We need states and homes and people who are armed. We cannot be seen as weak, soft targets. We must be ready and we must be smart. Violence, if it needs be, must come and the media and liberals of the world, must get on the bandwagon if we are to survive.
Sure, no one likes war or violence, but sometimes it’s necessary. Think what would have been different for Paris is there were more people willing and ready to protect themselves.
I don’t know all the answers, but we definitely need to prepare ourselves. We shouldn’t be pacifists or victims. We can’t stop every attacker, but we can sure try.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the position of Guns.com.
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