The terrorist attacks in Brussels Monday night brought home a very obvious lesson that most European nations and the United States under Barack Hussein Obama have refused to heed. The root cause of Islamic terrorism in Europe (and the United States) is not islamophobia (by the way, I’m suggest the left start trying out new names here as a healthy fear of Islam seems warranted by anyone not wishing to be blown up or beheaded) or the maltreatment of Muslim immigrants. The root cause, unsurprisingly, is Muslims.

The flags are at half-mast in Westminster in a show of solidarity with Brussels, one of those ceremonies Europe seems to be getting used to. We’re long used to the statements of shock by politicians (why the shock?) as well as the platitudes about this having nothing to do with any particular religion. After that we have the now traditional focus of all our anger and grief towards Katie Hopkins, as if what she says or believes makes any difference to the growing problem facing Europe. Not all of Europe, of course. Central Europe, chiefly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, remain largely safe from the terror threat, despite the former in particular being a Nato player in the Middle East. It is precisely because the reasons for this are so obvious that they cannot be mentioned. Poland is 0.1 percent Muslim, most of whom are from a long-settled Tartar community, Britain is 5 percent, France 9 percent and Brussels 25 percent, and those numbers are growing.

Yesterday, Ted Cruz, took a lot of flack for his statement that “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” I don’t know what this would look like in practice but I assume under such a regimen we would not have police arresting Christians for distributing religious tracts and we would not have federal authorities shutting down an investigation that would have prevented the San Bernardino massacre.

Many make the argument that only x% of Muslims are prone to terrorism and other violent manifestations of their religion and culture, such as honor killings and random beheadings of infidels, fine. I agree. I’m simply saying that any percent of a group being prone to violence as a function of their membership in the group creates a criminal conspiracy. Not every Hell’s Angel sells meth. Not every SS soldier worked in an extermination camp. But we can, and should, not be required to give either the benefit of the doubt. The attacks in France and Belgium, and before then in Spain and the UK, were fomented in communities which either knew or had strong suspicions of what was afoot and made the conscious decision that their tribal allegiance was more important than innocent human life.

Other than specious claims by ludicrous law professors that this would somehow violate the First Amendment (which it totally bullsh** on its face unless the professor wishes to argue that terrorism is a religious rite… an argument that I’m sort of predisposed to agree with in this case) the only other objection is that it will make Muslims mad and prone to terrorism. If appeasement is the only way of avoiding angry Muslims, maybe we should think through what we’re doing.

As a nation we’ve made the decision to abandon the “melting pot” metaphor for assimilating immigrants. The very fact that we print ballots in multiple languages when some facility for English is a requirement for citizenship shows how badly we have failed. It its place we’ve substituted the “salad bowl” where every failed, sad, and benighted culture is deemed equal despite the manifest evidence that there are very, very, very inferior cultures in this world. The sad thing is that by approaching immigration, particularly from the Islamic world, in this manner we have inflicted upon people who have come here to escape child marriage, FGM, polygamy, sharia, honor killings, and terrorism the exact same environment they have sought to escape because, in the name of tolerance, we allow a small number of vicious hatemongers to set up mosques and “charities” in these communities to continue business as usual.

A reduction, or complete stoppage, of Islamic immigration does nothing to offend the Constitution — which gives Congress the power to set immigration policy and gives no one a “right” to immigrate to the US — or American tradition — we are not, yet, an Islamic nation — or our ability to cooperate with our allies in accepting refugees. For instance, since January 2015 we have admitted a grand total of 430 Christians from the massive refugee camps created by Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s asinine efforts to overthrow Syria’s Assad. Four. Hundred. And. Thirty.

This despite large and historic Christian communities in Iraq and Syria being systematically attacked and ethnically cleansed by both ISIS and the various Islamic thugs the US government is funding.

We are at a junction where we need to decided whether we want to be France or Belgium or the UK and allow Islamic violence to take root and grow or we want to decline that opportunity. We’ve already seen what happens when an administration sticks its head someplace dark, moist, and warm and allows Islamic violence to flourish. You have workplace violence on Army bases, you have galleries shot up, you have recruiters gunned down at work, and you have a holiday party turned into a massacre. I use the work “allow” here deliberately because the law enforcement agencies of the federal government all had more than adequate warning of the danger posed by the assailants in all of those attacks but made the conscious decision that dead Americans was more palatable than angering CAIR and other terrorist organizations on the White House invite list.

There is no way we can proceed down the path Barack Obama has laid out for his nation and not become Paris or Brussels.