War is Hell: Ted Cruz, Dresden and Monitoring Muslim Neighborhoods...

I saw a segment last week of Ted Cruz on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Kimmel asked Cruz about his proposal to monitor Muslim neighborhoods.

Cruz answered, and then, not surprisingly, Kimmel asked whether or not monitoring those neighborhoods would just create more terrorists. In the end Kimmel stated that they would have to agree to disagree.

While theoretically it is possible that monitoring Muslim neighborhoods could, possibly, maybe, create terrorists from erstwhile peaceful Muslims, in the less theoretical real world Islamist terrorists are killing people and they’re often living in unmonitored Muslim neighborhoods. Indeed, Europe is chock full of no go zones where there is no monitoring whatsoever… and not surprisingly those areas are full of jihadis. And while it is certainly the case that many of those jihadis are streaming in over Europe’s wide open borders, many of them are home grown. One doesn’t have to look far to see that an insanely high portion of Muslims in Europe support terror as a mechanism to fight the West.

And so it goes that the left never seems to change, using wildly unlikely hypothetical problems to argue against policies that are targeting real actual problems. We see the same whether it’s the potential for “discrimination” associated with requiring photo ID’s to vote or the potential for “abuse” if union rules were changed to allow schools to fire teachers based on merit vs. tenure or the potential for global warming to annihilate mankind unless we abandon capitalism and free markets.

Unfortunately for Kimmel and much of the left, the real world requires that real problems be solved with real solutions rather than theoretical musings. The problem of Islamic terrorism exists today, has existed for decades and somehow the left thinks if we only hold hands with these misguided young men and sing Kumbaya they will suddenly throw down their bombs and guns and knives and matches and embrace us as brothers. But that is simply not going to happen. Indeed, Europe has spent the last 40 years opening their doors to Muslims and providing them with a panoply of benefits. The Europeans don’t require them to convert to Christianity – a religion which fewer and fewer Europeans themselves embrace – they don’t require them to live by European mores – polygamy, although often officially verboten is often overlooked – and increasingly Muslims have their own court systems to impose Sharia law. In other words, for decades Europeans have been allowing migrants from failed Muslim countries to move to Europe and import with them the failed cultures that drove them to escape in the first place…

Yet still a significant number of Muslims in Europe – and in some places a majority – reject the basic tenants of western culture: freedom, democracy and tolerance, and what’s worse, many have taken up arms against the very cultures that welcomed and often sustained them.

If Jimmy Kimmel and the rest of the left were right, Europe should have no problem with Islamic terror. Sure, they might have more crime due to sputtering economies driven by high taxes and socialist economic policies, but a stickup on a street corner or robbing a bank is different than blowing up a train or cutting Theo Van Gogh’s throat…

The solution to terror is not to bury our heads in the sand and passively wait for Muslim communities to turn in potential terrorists. History shows that is simply not going to happen. The way to stop terrorists is to hunt them down and arrest them or kill them in their tracks. Cruz said, when he talked about monitoring Muslim neighborhoods, he was talking about what the FBI did to break the back of the Mafia in the 1970's, 80's & 90’s or what police departments are doing across the country to fight gangs: Monitor, infiltrate and break the organization from within and without. So somehow it’s OK for the FBI to use these tactics on the Mafia operating in Italian neighborhoods around New York and New Jersey, or gangs in LA and Miami but it’s not OK to use them on Islamists hiding in plain sight in Muslim communities in Minneapolis and other cities around the country?

You can see Kimmel’s tactic regularly during debates and other venues when GOP candidates are asked if they approve of taking out terrorists when innocent women and children may be killed. Such questions ignore the realities of war. One need look no farther than WWII to see that, although regrettable, innocent civilians often die in war. Look up the history of Dresden or Hamburg or Tokyo during the war and see that the numbers of civilians killed during war can be in the tens of thousands. Should the Allies have let the war go on longer in order to minimize civilian casualties? How many more American soldiers or French farmers or Jews or Chinese would have died had the war dragged on for two more years? Civilian casualties may be regrettable, but war is rarely a clean, soldier to soldier battle. That’s particularly true when Islamist terrorists hide in hospitals, mosques, schools and attack civilians in restaurants, churches and transportation hubs.

War is as they say, Hell.  It's a dirty, bloody, regrettable endeavor, but once engaged it should be fought to win, not simply fought not to lose, or not to offend the bad guys or their relatives or supporters. Monitoring neighborhoods where Muslim terrorists seek to hide is not the same as putting Muslims in internment camps, nor is it the same as prohibiting the practice of their religion. It’s simply dealing with the reality that there are terrorists among us who want nothing more than to kill as many civilians as they can in as many ways as they can, and they are doing so while hiding in plain sight. (You can’t get any more in plain sight than Maj. Nidal Hassan…) It is time to stop worrying about political correctness and hypothetical problems and hurt feelings when it comes to protecting the country from Islamic terror. If political correctness imposes Muslim no-go zones here in America as they have done across Europe then Islamist terrorists will have a field day and we should expect a rapid increase in the number of Americans killed and maimed in malls and restaurants, airports and malls. Ted Cruz cares more about protecting the American people – including honest, hardworking Muslims – than he does about hurting feelings of people who might be so off balance that they can be swayed to terror simply by a cop in their neighborhood or the FBI questioning of their Imam. That’s a good thing… and the country will be better for it when he’s president.