“What is our aim? Victory! Victory at all costs; victory however long and hard the road may be; victory in spite of all terror for without victory there is no survival.”

~ Winston Churchill

Amidst the coverage of the horrors of yet another terrorist attack, it was poignant to watch the British veterans of World War II celebrate and remember their victories in a ceremony in the middle of London yesterday marking the official end of World War II. Churchill’s spirit in Churchill’s soldiers.

Their dignity and defiance put into stark relief the hand-wringing attitude of many in the western media and political life as one continued to watch the press conferences and public pronouncements. Leaders, with rare exceptions, seemed dazed and bewildered. Journalists, in much too typical fashion, commented cloyingly on the need to find ways to deal with the “fringe fanatics” of the “Islamic street”. Talking-head analysts still pathetically pontificated about finding the “root causes” for terror and how difficult it is to “ferret out the killers” since destroying them meant killing human beings not just machines. And herein lies the problem.

The West’s perception that these vermin are people not projectiles. Too many in the liberal democratic world reflect the sad hopes of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh who, even as he was being shot in the middle of an Amsterdam street, pleaded with his killers before the final bullets that ended his life tore through his body, “Surely we can discuss this!” Well, the truth is that you can’t talk with vermin. The truth is that they are not going to change, so we must. The truth is that we must begin looking at these “human beings” as killing machines just as surely as if they were tanks or planes. And we must act accordingly.

It may not be possible to find every single individual terrorist. It may even take still more time to find Bin-Laden and his henchmen. But one thing every intelligence agency in the West knows are the locations of many of the training camps of these venomous barbarians. Stretched from Pakistan and continuing across the Islamic Middle Rim of this small planet to the deserts of Libya, these camps can and must be attacked and eliminated. The policies of western governments until now have been hamstrung by an attitude that fails to recognize that these staging areas are not filled with human beings, but by killing machines delivering death just as surely as if their skins were of metal and not of flesh.

The Jihadists know that western humanism is their greatest protection. They attack us because they can. Destruction without mercy and with dispatch is their policy not ours. Perhaps it’s time to borrow a page from their book. Anger management won’t work with this crowd.

It is time to understand that this enemy means to take full control of our lives; dictate every single move we make and, if we dare resist,  feels it is his divine duty to kill us. To them the advent of Islam meant that all previous religions were "mansukh", abrogated, and their followers regarded as "kuffar", infidels, with no more status than “pigs or monkeys”. Well, it seems high time that we in the West, free-thinkers and observant alike, return the compliment.

They believe that we must be shocked into conversion through spectacular “ghazavat”, or raids, of the kind we saw in New York and Washington in 2001, in Madrid last year, and now in London. That the London attack was intended as a ghazava was confirmed in a statement by the Secret Organization Group of al-Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe, an Islamist group that claimed responsibility for the atrocity. It said "We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid (ghazava) in Britain after our mujahideen exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid." Those who carry out these missions are called ghazis, the highest of all Islamic distinctions just below that of the shahid or martyr. A ghazi who also becomes a shahid is considered doubly holy. This is the insidious face of our enemy.

The timing of the attack should also be instructive to those who still claim that the ideological basis of the Jihadists represent a fringe element in Islam. The London attack came on the first day of the Arabic lunar month of Jamadul al-Akhir,  Muhammad's favorite season for organizing raids against the "infidel."

It is time that we stop being shocked by the fact that an individual, bereft of humanity, is ready to die in order to kill others.  These people are merely a new form of weaponry. And, like all other weapons that impress when first introduced, these suicide-killers will continue to terrorize and fascinate until we marshal the resolve to destroy their breeding  grounds.

Cyrus the Great used camels as a weapon when he conquered Babylon. Hannibal used elephants for his raid on Rome. The Islamist terror leaders who wish to conquer the world and convert entire mankind to their brand of "true Islam" have simply gone one better by using the human body as a weapon.

But like all others, this weapon is designed by expert “technicians”, financed by investors, manufactured somewhere and deployed by leaders who can be identified and destroyed. We must rouse ourselves out of our shocked impotence caused by a mindset that sees these killing-machines as some kind of ethereal beings existing beyond the limits of reality.

They are very real, and we need bold purpose to deal with them. That purpose can be found in Churchill’s legacy to us today. His words echo through history and must resonate with all those of courage and conscience. “What is our aim?”, he said. “Victory! Victory at all costs; victory however long and hard the road may be; victory in spite of all terror for without victory there is no survival.”

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