In the last 36 hours, the world reeled from the horror and shock of the terror attacks that took the lives of at least 129 persons and wounded hundreds more. In response a lot of Americans did what they instinctively do in reaction to everything that happens these days. They changed their profile picture on Facebook.

Facebook makes it easy to shade your picture with the French tricolor and a great many people have done so. In reaction to that a close friend whom I respect greatly noted that, if Facebook had been around in 1941, she doubted that Americans would have wasted their time changing their profile pictures, posting John Lennon song lyrics or impressing upon their friends the fact that they were praying. Instead they would, she said, say it was time to go out and kill these bleeps. It was, she asserted, a war between good and evil and it was time for us to start acting like it. Another friend similarly urged us to skip the social media solidarity and to concentrate on killing our enemies.

Both are undoubtedly right. Moreover, their resentment about the use of Facebook in this manner is rooted in a reasonable concern that for a lot of Americans, a meaningless gesture like this is about as far as they’re willing to go when it comes to the war on Islamist terror.

But it’s also a little bit unfair. There is nothing really wrong with changing your Facebook profile to show you care about Paris. The various images of solidarity being used illustrate some laudable sympathy as well an unwillingness to let the incident pass without comment. To some extent these pictures are like a flag hanging in front of your house. It’s a symbol that, at worst, does no harm and perhaps a little good, since it encourages others to similarly express their patriotism.

After all, most Americans feel helpless to do anything about atrocities such as the one we saw unfold in Paris other than to make a statement on Facebook. And who can blame them for that? They have a president that has consistently downplayed the threat from ISIS and even the day of the attack had claimed that his half-hearted efforts had “contained” the terror group. If our government and the mightiest armed forces in the world can’t stop them, then perhaps the best ordinary citizens can do is to utter a prayer and express some bland sympathy.

So if you are moved by the images you’ve seen from France, by all means change your Facebook status or profile picture to say so if that has some meaning to you. But that isn’t all that you should be doing.

It is not enough to merely observe events. If you are serious about expressing solidarity, you need to advocate for policies that will be aimed at preventing atrocities like the ones in Paris from recurring.

What are those policies?

Demand that the Obama administration end what our Max Boot rightly says is a “phony war” against ISIS. ISIS arose in Iraq and Syria because of U.S. neglect that was a direct result of the president’s precipitate withdrawal from Iraq that squandered the victories the surge had earned.

The reason the president has gotten away with a half-hearted approach to the war against ISIS is because he believes the American people are too war weary as well as too uninformed about this crisis to care enough to force him to do more. We do well to worry about repeating the mistakes the Bush administration made in Iraq. But the mistakes Obama has made by staying out of Syria and neglecting Iraq have already come at a high cost. If we spend the next year and the years beyond that talking a good game about working with allies and the necessity to minimize U.S. “boots on the ground,” then those costs will be infinitely higher. The fight against ISIS is not only going badly in Paris. The atrocities it is committing in Syria and Iraq are worse and the West isn’t making much, if any progress, in eliminating them. Like it or not, the West is at war with an Islamist movement that can’t be wished away. It must be fought and defeated on the ground in the Middle East as well as elsewhere. If you don’t want to see more attacks like the ones in Paris, then you have to make up your mind to the use of massive force to wipe out ISIS wherever it may be found.

Demand that our leaders define the enemy. This is an administration that refuses to say that an Islamist terrorist movement backed by many millions of people is the problem. Instead, it keeps telling us that the butchers of ISIS are an isolated, small group of “violent extremists.” Yet it cannot account for the fact that this small group is able to appeal to such large numbers both in the Middle East and among the Muslim population living in the West.

On Saturday night at the latest Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders repeated the absurd claim that not only was global warming a greater threat than the terrorism but that it was the root cause of this problem. He and the other candidates including a former secretary of state who likes to pretend that she’s tough on terror, similarly refused to speak candidly what is motivating the killers and the extensive support they can mobilize throughout the Muslim world. Whatever you may think about climate change, people aren’t exploding bombs and slaughtering innocents in restaurants, stadiums, and theaters because they’re hot and thirsty. They’re doing it because they’ve been taught their faith says its okay. It is true that we are not at war with Islam or all Muslims. Most American Muslims deplore ISIS. But if the West is to fight and win this war, it can’t pretend that we aren’t fighting a branch of Islam that has considerable support. By ignoring this we are sending a message to the enemy that says we aren’t serious and they needn’t fear us. They should fear us. Moreover, moderate Muslims need to spend less time being offended by efforts to root out sympathy for terror and fabricating charges about a mythical backlash against them in the United States and more effort confronting the foe within their communities and mosques.

Step up intelligence gathering at home and abroad. For much of the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about how terrible it is that the government is spying on people as part of its counter-terrorism strategy. Some on the left as well as on the right have demonized the effort to collect metadata about communications with known terror suspects. They’ve also managed to shut down efforts to gain more intelligence about possible domestic threats because of worries that doing so offends Muslims.

This is relevant because Paris was obviously primarily an intelligence failure, and we can’t avoid the fact that most of the focus on intelligence recently has been about restraining the ability to collect data about the enemy rather than increasing those efforts.

Intelligence efforts must be conducted within the law and the potential for abuse should be monitored closely. But we must also realize that the September 10th mentality at the core of these complaints is a big part of the problem that we faced before Paris. If we’re to truly do something about ISIS, then it is precisely that sense of complaisance that the president has unfortunately encouraged that must be changed first.

Elect a president who understands foreign policy and can be trusted as commander in chief. Every four years we go through the exercise of electing a leader while neglecting to prioritize the qualities that speak to their ability to do the president’s most important job: conduct foreign policy. Any president can do little to affect the economy but the responsibility for war and peace is primarily theirs.

But unfortunately, even after events in the Middle East have shown just how important foreign policy is and the cost of this administration’s neglect, we are still observing a presidential race where many of the candidates, including the two frontrunners in the Republican field, have a minimal understanding of foreign policy and learn most of what they know about military problems from watching television. In the Democratic field, the leading candidate was an integral part of an administration that badly underestimated the threat and hasn’t produced a coherent response to the challenge.

The point is you can vote for whichever party you like. But if you want to be more than a Facebook foe of Islamism, then you need to make your decision next year based in large measure on the question of which candidate will prioritize the complete defeat of ISIS, and not just a desultory effort to minimize the damage or to spin this failure as the Obama administration has been doing non-stop both before and after the Paris attacks. You must also elect someone with a sophisticated grasp of these issues and not just a set of slogans their handlers have forced them to memorize.

If those that are tinting their pictures with the colors of the French tricolor want to actually do something more important than post a picture, they also need to act. These suggestions are a start but they all amount to accepting that we are at war and that our government’s top priority should be victory.