Last week comes Newt Gingrich with a modest proposition: test Muslims here for their Sharia fealty. The price of loyalty to Sharia, per Newt, is deportation. President Obama branded Newt’s common sense as “repugnant”.

Lies have ways of being ground to dust by cruel realities. The liars, when it comes to the jihad against us, principally, are Democrats, though they have some enablers among the Republican establishment. Paul Ryan needs to zip his lip about compassion for Syrian refugees. The blood of innocents just spilled in Nice -- and in Orlando, San Bernardino, and Paris -- all within the span of less than a year -- tells a horrific tale. The killers do so for Allah. Misfits some of the killers may be, but misfits of a certain faith and similar cultural backgrounds, they are. They’re perfect recruits in a highly unconventional war against the West and U.S.

Said Newt to Sean Hannity per GOP USA:

“We need to be fairly relentless about defining who our enemies are,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “Anybody who goes on a website favoring ISIS, or Al Qaeda, or other terrorist groups, that should be a felony, and they should go to jail. Any organization which hosts such a website should be engaged in a felony. It should be closed down immediately.”

Newt also called for the “monitoring of mosques,” mosques being principle sources of radicalism and agitation. Newt here doesn’t go far enough (or perhaps he’s going as far as he thinks the public can tolerate at present).

Doubtless, the FBI already possesses a list of mosques that promote anti-Western and anti-American sentiment and that, in some form, inspire violence against us. With willpower, Washington could shutter these mosques tomorrow and send their imams packing. As well, DC could muster the resources and erect the infrastructure to begin sweeps of Muslim communities in short order. Closing hostile mosques and rounding up bad players and sympathizers would do much to better secure the homeland.

One wonders if Newt was floating a trial balloon for Trump. Newt was, after all, under consideration to be Trump’s running mate; he may well have an important role in a Trump administration.

Whether or not this was Newt being Newt, or working as Trump’s stalking horse, public reaction was, at the very least, muted. There was no big blowback. No cries about infringements on religious and civil liberties or idiotic platitudes voiced about pluralism. No push among the public to marginalize the former speaker. Let’s add that silence confers assent.

In a June 20 “War on Terror Update,” Rasmussen Reports states:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the United States is safer today than it was before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. That’s down from 33% last November and is the lowest level of confidence in regular tracking since November 2006. Most voters (60%) say America is not safer now, up seven points from the previous survey. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure.

Post-Orlando and pre-Nice, voters believing the U.S. is safer since 9/11 was just one out of four (likely mostly liberals). Confidence in the U.S. being safer was low to begin with. Expect that percentage to dip further. Who knows where the floor is on this question, but every fresh attack and downward tick can’t help Hillary and her Democrats this November. And why shouldn’t we suppose that other attacks will occur before November.

Newt’s proposal seems restrained when considering David P. Goldman’s remedy (hat tip, Thomas Lifson) to remove terrorists’ threats throughout the West. Goldman -- under the moniker Spengler -- writes at the Asia Times that the West needs to address the threat in a vein similar to Sherman’s and Sheridan’s approach to the South during the Civil War.

Wrote Goldman:

Like Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who burned a great swath through Georgia and the Carolinas, Sheridan believed that war is won not just by killing soldiers but by denying them support from a broader civilian population. There’s nothing particularly clever about this insight.

Goldman concluded:

The way to win the war is to frighten the larger community of Muslims who passively support terror by action or inaction -- frighten them so badly that they will inform on family members. Frightening the larger Muslim population in the West does not require a great deal of effort: a few thousand deportations would do.

Goldman’s proposal appears tougher than Newt’s, given the historical parallel he draws on. But Goldman’s conclusion may contain a faulty assumption that Newt’s doesn’t. The existence of Muslim communities in Europe and the U.S. are source-problems, yes. But one wonders if the deportation of a “few thousand” villains from Muslim communities would break these communities sufficiently in any sustained manner?

It would seem that unless or until the insularity of these communities are smashed, and until there’s a significant separating out, European governments and DC would need to conduct ongoing programs of vigilance and intervention. Does the will exist in the democratic West and U.S. to maintain this effort?

The fight is, after all, both ideological and religious. An ideological foe is probably easier to beat than a religious one. What motivates jihad is strict interpretations of koranic teachings and adherence to Sharia. Newt’s proposal to test for Sharia is more sweeping. Removal of not only bad actors but sympathizers does more to diminish and break Muslim communities in the West, whatever the tally.

There must be clear delineations between friendlies and enemies in Western Muslim communities, with “no tolerance” policies for anyone suspected of enemy sympathies. When in doubt, deport.

There’s an allusion other than the one Goldman suggests to the Civil War. It’s the Indian removal policies that largely subsequently followed on the heels of the Civil War. The parallel isn’t exact; no one is suggesting that all Muslims be moved to reservations in, say, Alaska. But many may be removed back to their countries of origin. Westernization must be insisted upon. For natural-born Muslims who collude with the enemy, they should face the severest penalties, up to and including death.

None of this is for the faint of heart. Americans still may be repelled by so aggressive policing. Democrats and the MSM will do their best to make the enforcers the fiends. But more attacks and more carnage will make Americans less… particular… about tough policies aimed at safeguarding themselves and their families.

A few months ago in Washington, over dinner with an attorney friend who works for Republicans, he said this about the jihad: “Not enough of us Americans have died at home yet to make the hard choices acceptable.” Perhaps that’s less true today. Most certainly it will be less true tomorrow.