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USA Today

Madrid, London, Paris and now Brussels. The latest monstrous attack against European civilians peacefully going about their daily lives took place Tuesday, killing dozens of people in the Belgian capital’s airport and one of its subway stations. Early reports said the attacks included at least one person deranged enough to detonate himself in a crowd of travelers and a claim of responsibility by the Islamic State, the successor to the al-Qaeda terrorists who flew airplanes into buildings in the United States 15 years ago.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, might be losing on the battlefield. By one account, its self-proclaimed caliphate has shrunk by about a fifth since 2014 after mounting pressure from a U.S.-led coalition. But attacking soft targets and slaughtering civilians doesn’t take strength, just guile and the death-cult mentality that characterizes this virulent form of radical Islam.

Nervous Americans look across an ocean and see a Europe that seems even more feckless and more vulnerable to terrorism than the USA. Belgian police are hobbled by rules that prohibit them from conducting raids at night. French authorities missed signs of the horrific attack that killed 130 people in Paris in November. It was only last Friday that authorities finally caught the apparent lone surviving perpetrator of those attacks, who had been living in a Muslim section of Brussels for four months, and prematurely crowed about their success.

The insular Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels, in fact, looks like a symbol of what’s problematic about the decades-long Muslim diaspora in Europe: a closed community that in many ways still lives according to the strict culture and rules it never really left behind, reluctant to become a part of its adopted homeland and too willing to hide co-religionists who commit unspeakable crimes.

Americans believe that this nation’s tradition of religious tolerance, and its history of integrating waves of immigrants into a vast cultural melting pot, makes the U.S. a different and safer place, and they’re largely right.

But a spate of xenophobic rhetoric threatens to undermine that advantage. The most prominent practitioner, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, was all over TV on Tuesday, peddling his usual venom against Muslims — unwittingly helping ISIL and other extremists sell their own claim that the U.S. and other Western countries hate Muslims and are united in a modern crusade against them.

It’s one thing to note — correctly — that the attackers in Brussels, Paris and elsewhere have all been radical Muslims, and that President Obama was slow to confront the rise of ISIL and recognize the dangers of Syria's disintegration. But it's quite another thing to smear the world's 1.6 billion Muslims with the implication that they’re so dangerous, they must be treated with suspicion and can’t be allowed into the country.

The purpose of terrorists: Other views

The long war against radical Islam requires superior intelligence capabilities, particularly within Muslim communities, and aggressively taking the fight to ISIL, not simply trying to play defense at transportation hubs and an endless array of other soft targets. Without Muslims on America’s side, that war will be infinitely harder to win.

It takes Muslims to stand against the tiny minority of savage radicals in the U.S. and other nations, and Muslim forces to stand against ISIL in Syria, Iraq, Libya and everywhere they have gained a foothold. Alienating crucial allies in a shared war against extremists is, quite simply, stupid. Americans should not let it happen.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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