ISIS wants all-out war; we'd be fools to let them lead us to it

The time gap between action and reaction to moments of violent horror in our society grows ever shorter. People scarcely took the time to allow for the funerals of the victims of the Orlando massacre before politicizing it, and demanding violent retribution.

Don't wait for the full facts to come out, we need a lynch mob.

Act in haste, regret at leisure, as the saying goes.

Columnist Michael Taube, a former speechwriter for former prime minister Stephen Harper, wants Western democracies to declare all-out war on Islamic State, committing troops to hand-to-hand combat “to eradicate this evil presence from the face of the Earth.”

He wrote that it's a fight that would take years, cost enormously and require huge losses on the battlefield. But it's a sacrifice he is willing to make — from the safety of his desk.

He referenced a column in the National Review that said: “Islamic terrorist's war . . . will continue here as long as we refuse to exercise the tactics necessary to stamp it out.”

Taube suggests such tactics would include identifying anyone who supports “radical Islam” as an “enemy of freedom, liberty and democracy.” Such people need to be “constantly attacked and denigrated,” according to his column.

That would be sort of hard to do, since even America's top spymasters, listening in on our every phone call, reading every text, Tweet and email, can't locate ISIS operatives within their own borders.

That is, if Omar Mir Seddique Mateen even was an ISIS operative — which is far from certain.

Rather, these kinds of tactics will far sooner result in home-grown atrocities, perpetrated by our own governments, than wiping anything from the face of the Earth.

Let's consider a small portion of what our governments are doing now to identify and denigrate potential terrorists within our borders: the no-fly list.

It's a net that snares five-year-old children born with the wrong-sounding name. The snare never releases its catch, and there is no appeal process for even a young child to be shown he or she is not a terrorist, therefor they can never board an airplane.

And we would want to expand that to government powers of war for anyone who looks different, speaks different or prays different than us? There is no such thing as “radical Islam” any more than there is such a thing as gun-toting abortion clinic attackers who are “radical Christian.”

There are just good people and criminals. And if we make religion or ethnicity the first filters in deciding between them, we are on the road to destruction. Which, if you look at it, is exactly what ISIS wants from us.

There are still people among us who can remember the arrests and murder of innocent people identified as enemies of the state because of the way they prayed: Jews during the Holocaust.

There are still Canadians alive today whose perfectly peaceful homes and businesses were confiscated and who were imprisoned — without legal recourse — because they were of Japanese descent.

On the road between Banff and Lake Louise, you can tour the remains of the prison camp where, recently in our history, we put people who were too Ukrainian to be trusted to stay on their farms and milk their cows.

How well did all that go in protecting “freedom, liberty and democracy?”

And now there are people who want us to do this all over again, this time with Muslims. One such person wants to be president of the United States.

This is playing into the terrorists' game.

I don't know how one goes about eradicating mindless hate masquerading as pure faith. But I suspect massive bloodshed creating even more massive throngs of displaced refugees is not the best way to go about it.

As far back as the Crusades, those tactics have never worked.

So rather than acting on a knee-jerk desire for revenge, let's instruct our leaders to get the facts and think about what does work to eliminate the foundation on which this hate is based.

Hint: it's not religion.

Follow Greg Neiman's blog at Readersadvocate.blogspot.ca