After the horrible terrorist attack in Nice, France, millions of Americans, Frenchmen, and others around the world are probably asking themselves what can be done to stop the seemingly unending wave of deadly Islamist terrorist attacks from Dhaka, Bangladesh to San Bernardino, California.

These attacks have been conducted using explosives, guns, and now an ordinary vehicle. Here in the U.S., Islamist terrorists have plotted or attacked the U.S. 25 times since the start of 2015, by far the most active period of terrorist activity since 9/11.

Now is not the time for a knee-jerk response, but it is time to take a serious appraisal of the threat and what we can do to stop it here at home.

The U.S. has faced 89 Islamist terror plots or attacks against the homeland since 9/11, with over a quarter of those occurring in the past 18 months.

Seventy-eight of these plots involved a homegrown, U.S.-born terrorist. Eleven plots have been successful, leaving 91 Americans dead while wounding and terrorizing countless more. Five of these successful plots have been in the past 12 months and have killed 68 Americans. Of course, if it were not for the work of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, other plots would have succeeded, likely killing thousands more.

It is this reality of both success and failure that should drive our future efforts. Our greatest successes have been hard-fought victories achieved through difficult police work and the vigilance of our intelligence community. Undercover agents, wiretaps, examination of computer data, and many other tools have been essential to stopping Islamist terrorists. When we have failed to stop an attack, we often ask why our police and intelligence agencies failed to recognize and stop the threat.

Our greatest asset in preventing terrorism has been, and must continue to be, our law enforcement and intelligence communities armed with the tools and resources they need. Since 9/11, the U.S. has taken important steps in this direction, but we must continue to improve and refine these tools.

This does not mean our government can ignore our rights under the Constitution. Every program and law must meet constitutional scrutiny. But this does mean that within the bounds of the Constitution, strong and proactive investigatory tools should be given to our security forces with careful oversight from all branches of government.

In so doing we can maximize both our security and our liberty, rather than trading one for the other.

Aided by efforts in community outreach, counter radicalization, improved sharing between the FBI and local law enforcement, and other preventative approaches to terrorism, the U.S. can stop more terrorism before its strikes. (For more from the author of “These Are the Tools We Need to Win the Long War Against Islamist Terrorism” please click HERE)

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Our political class, which includes both parties, spent an entire month debating gun control and turning a blind eye to the combatants behind those guns and how we have willfully allowed them into our country and have promoted their Muslim Brotherhood lobbyists at the highest levels of government. This past week, in Nice, France, a Tunisian-Muslim immigrant murdered 84 people in a Jihad attack that mainly involved a truck. He also reportedly got out of the car, shouted “Allah Akbar,” and began shooting into the crowd with a firearm he took from the truck, which was loaded with grenades and firearms. France has stricter gun laws than even what Democrats [publicly] want implemented in our country, yet they are suffering even more at the hands of Islamic jihad. What will it take to end the willful blindness on the part of political elites?

The willful blindness of sharia-based Islam – the glue that binds together all jihadists – is endemic of both political parties. Here is the preamble of the “counter-terrorism” legislation Republicans wanted to pass before conservatives rebelled against the effort:

The preeminent terrorist threats to the United States are radical Islamist terrorist networks such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and their allies and affiliate networks, as well as lone-wolf supporters and sympathizers in the United States and around the world.

This is beyond tone-deaf. It’s willful blindness. The Islamic State was created in 2013, long after the modern era of Islamic jihad. We are not at war with networks or tactics; there is a clash of civilization and it is rooted in Sharia-Islam and the dictates of the Hadith, as practiced by millions of Muslims and rooted in a number of nation-states from Iran to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and even the government we established in Afghanistan. It is that motivation that has inspired so many Muslims living in the West to either support jihad or, worse, actually pursue it.

Western leaders have always sought to isolate and decompartmentalize the problem. The jihadists in the Caucuses were “Chechnyians,” the savages in Israel were “Palestinians.” The West sought to legitimize and validate their grievances as rooted in geographical political disputes. In fact, they were all rooted in Jihad as dictated by the Hadith. The West blamed Israel for suffering from suicide bombings and vehicular attacks for years. Tragically, we now see that those tactics have made their way to the West – tactics employed by the same enemy with the same ideology.

This willful blindness of focusing myopically on ISIS and Al Qaeda while downright promoting the Islamic supremacist ideology behind it affects our immigration, homeland security, and national security/military policies. For if we are unwilling to acknowledge the enemy and its threatening doctrine, we will pursue dyslexic policies in those three realms.

It is this willful blindness that has led CIA Director John Brennan to conclude this week that “Saudi Arabia is among our closest counterterrorism partners.”

It is this willful blindness that has allowed our military leadership to throw our soldiers into Islamic civil wars to fight one sharia-adherent group of Muslims on behalf of other sharia-adherent Muslims, while shunning true reformist leaders in places like Egypt and Libya who would actually fight Islamic supremacism.

It is this willful blindness that has allowed Islamic supremacist groups with ties to Hamas to become the leaders of American Muslims, obtain security clearances and meet with Congress 325 times in one year.

It is this willful blindness that has allowed countries like France to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East who subscribe to the underlying ideology shared by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Nice terrorist. And it is this appalling willful blindness that has caused our political leaders to learn nothing from the mistakes of Europe and instead, follow blindly in their footsteps.

What paves the road for endless numbers of Muslims in the West who make the ultimate decision to engage in violent Jihad is the climate of civilization jihad that is rooted in the mosques, schools, and political organizations, mainly run by Muslim Brotherhood groups. The notion that we would allow more individuals into our country who subscribe to this ideology is maniacal and suicidal. There are certainly no constitutional mandates on prospectively bringing in any group of immigrants, and as I explore in two chapters of Stolen Sovereignty, our Founders and early political leaders up until just two generations ago all agreed to only admit those who completely shared our political values. This was the essence of Teddy Roosevelt’s message right before he passed away:

But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. . . .We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people

The guiding principle of our immigration policy was to only admit those who unquestionably adhered to our values system. Our contemporary guiding principle is to admit anyone and everyone – in large numbers over short periods of time – from cultures that clash with ours unless they have a card identifying them up front as a member of a known terror group. When our early political leaders in both parties promoted policies that weeded out those immigrants who didn’t share our values, they were dealing with Europeans from Western Civilization. They could have never imagined an ideology that is the complete antithesis of constitutional republicanism being invited in and championed by the political elites on such a large scale. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the famed Nuremberg prosecutor, best encapsulated the incompatibility of Sharia with western civilization in a statement published in 1955:

In any broad sense, Islamic Law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge — all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire — reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law [i.e., Islamic Law, Sharia] of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western Law…Islamic law, on the contrary, finds its chief source in the will of Allah as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It contemplates one community of the faithful, though they may be of various tribes and in widely separated locations. Religion, not nationalism or geography, is the proper cohesive force. The state itself is subordinate to the Qur’an, which leaves little room for additional legislation, none for criticism or dissent. This world is viewed as but the vestibule to another and a better one for the faithful, and the Qur’an lays down rules of behavior towards others and toward society to assure a safe transition. It is not possible to separate political or juristic theories from the teachings of the Prophet, which establish rules of conduct concerning religious, domestic, social, and political life. This results in a law of duties, rather than rights…

In the irony of all ironies, this very statement from Justice Jackson has been purged from our counterterrorism training for federal law enforcement, at the behest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s CVE agenda.

As it states in the Bible, the truth is not in the heaven or in a far off land; it “is very close to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can fulfill it [Deuteronomy 30:14]. We don’t need to conjure up unconstitutional or novel ideas or focus on trucks, guns, and tactics in order to secure this nation. We need to simply recognize the incontrovertible truth and employ basic common sense and stop self-immolating. (For more from the author of “Time for Political Elites to Stand up to Sharia” please click HERE)

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