PARIS, Nov. 15, 2015 – They were ISIS, the enemy of the free world. They wore black. Their faces were not concealed. Their identities will be confirmed in the coming days, but there is no question of who carried out the Paris attacks.

They had been trained to attack, their bodies strapped with enough explosives to kill as they died, armed with AK-47s to begin the assault on Paris. They are the soldiers of ISIS, and the only aspect of their assault that was missing was the uniforms.

In modern warfare, the dead are identified from fingerprints and DNA, not uniforms, and those soldiers were on a suicide mission. They weren’t coming back.

It is war on a global scale, and to label it as an isolated terror attack misleads the U.S. and the world as to the methods and means to fight it.





For the Friday the 13th attackers, whose blood-letting in Parisian streets evoked memories of the revolutionary Jacobins and compelled authorities to impose the first curfew over the French capital since the Nazi occupation, the murders of hundreds of innocents was a divinely inspired act of jihad against Western civilization. The non-Islamic world has stood in the way of radical Islam’s dream of global domination throughout history, and their means of attack was a military assault, plain and simple.

To the attackers, their slaughter of innocent Parisians was an act of jihad, a holy war fought under their warped interpretation of the Quran. They are martyrs, heroes to millions of fellow Islamists across the globe, and their attacks are sure to be replicated.

The attacks will come soon, and often. They will not stop until their goal of the collapse of the West has been attained or they are ultimately defeated.

At risk is the expansion of their caliphate across the world and the survival of our way of life.

ISIS strategy shift raises global terror threat

Conventional warfare is fought between nations and coalitions of nations. If we are to win the war against ISIS and its allies, the face of radical Islam, we must first identify the enemy and devise a unified way to defeat them. To describe the carnage in Paris as merely a terrorist attack is a diversion from an incontrovertible fact: We are at war with radical Islam, and they have waged this war since the 7th century.

The West faces an enemy that glorifies the systematic beheading of prisoners, imposition of rape slavery, genocide and other manifestations of barbarism by reference to their warped interpretation of the Islamic faith. Many Westerners are oblivious—some even deliberately so—to the magnitude and severity of the threat posed by radical Islam.

Some “leaders”—President Obama foremost among them—cannot even bring themselves to utter the phrase “Islamic terrorist.” Other politicians and opinion-makers use words such as “terrorism” or “criminal acts” to describe a situation that can simply be described as war. They weakly assure their frightened constituents that the killers will be “brought to justice,” implying that law enforcement and criminal trials are sufficient to punish the perpetrators and deter subsequent attacks.

The Battle of Paris consisted of well-coordinated attacks waged by the Islamic caliphate on the soil of its enemies. Radical Islam has had its designs on the capture and incorporation of Europe within its dominions since the 7th Century, and war has been waged for hundreds of years. For our president to appear in front of the cameras and declare that ISIS is contained is an outright deception.

For those who have missed the footage of ISIS’ brutality–toddlers crucified in Syria and Iraq, women sold into rape slavery by the hundreds and the destruction of ancient religious and architectural treasures—it bears stressing that radical Islam is not merely a set of ideas and beliefs that are at odds with what we in the West hold dear. Radical Islam is the greatest threat the West has ever known. They have presented we infidels with a choice: Convert to their barbaric worldview or die.





Law enforcement, criminal justice systems and all the other instruments of power—including the limited use of military force—are woefully inadequate to the eradication of an evil foe that leaves crucified children, raped women and incinerated men in its wake.

The deliberate and perverse failure to recognize the Friday the 13th attacks for what they are, a battle in a existential and global conflict declared by radical Islam for the purpose of destroying Western civilization, guarantees only one result: We will lose if we only react, labeling each attack as an act of terrorism committed by misguided criminals. But before we can fight, we must face the fact that we are in a global war. The stakes are the survival of Western civilization.

ISIS is utterly undeterrable. They will never attend peace talks. They will never negotiate peace. They will not compromise, for to do so is inimical to their avowed purpose: the defeat and overthrow of Western civilization. Therefore, we must fight a total war against ISIS. The counterinsurgencies, nation-building, rule-of-law development and armed social work projects the West has undertaken over the past 15 years have failed.

Our battle on behalf of the free world must be a unified battle, with every nation an active participant. We need to work in concert with every nation, including Russia, willing to wipe this scourge from the face of the earth. We must transform our mentality, our culture and our mindset to reawaken the fighting spirit that has been diminished over the past two generations.

To achieve victory, we must come to believe once again in our inherent goodness, our decency and our right—indeed, our duty—to fight on behalf of our civilization. We must set aside differences over petty political and social issues and come together in righteous rage against ISIS and radical Islam.

In this coming war, we will be the bearer of duties as well as rights. We have a role to play in this war, and the defeat of radical Islam will require us to be affirmed in our knowledge that our cause is just, that our methods and means are appropriate and that victory is essential to our survival.

Can there be peace with Islam?

The West has been bequeathed a great treasure that is under assault by radical Islam. Our ideals, our way of life, are under attack from ISIS and its allies.We should acknowledge them as a caliphate and wage war. They are not terrorists, but rather combatants in an existential war against the West. They are the enemy of Western civilization.

Our leaders and opinion elites have failed us by compromising our instincts for self-preservation, implying that we are somehow to blame for this war, that our cause is unjust. They send the message that, if we were to use the methods and means necessary to win, we would somehow sacrifice the moral high ground. We deserve leaders who will reveal these propositions for the lies that they are, who will admit that we are at war and that we have a duty to win it, and who will lead us to victory over ISIS and radical Islam more generally.

How we will respond to the Friday the 13th attacks is as yet unclear. Perhaps the West is so demoralized and fatigued and so lacking in courage, that we will continue to play the ostrich, burying our head in the sand and hoping that all will be well. That is an illusion that will ultimately result in duplication of these attacks throughout the world, and the United States of America is at the center of their plan of attack.

Only leaders with the wisdom and courage to acknowledge reality and the skills to lead the fight to wage a total war against radical Islam can prevent a new Dark Age. Unless such leaders emerge and unless we in the West acknowledge that now is a time to kill, the Friday the 13th attacks, in years to come, may well be remembered as the beginning of the end of Western civilization.

William Brute Bradford contributed to this article.