Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to how to stop the continued uptick in attacks stemming from jihadists on our soil. In the short term, we are going to have to continue to have faith in our Homeland Security apparatus, FBI, police, and supporting agencies to continue doing the great work they are doing in prevention, counterintelligence, and monitoring. This has certainly included our share of good fortune as we saw in this most recent case at Times Square. More importantly, in the long term, our nation desperately needs to wake up to the war of ideas. We have taken major steps backward in the past year too many to mention here. While the Obama administration wastes its time striking the words "Islam," "Islamic," "Islamist" and "Jihadist" from the government lexicon, the Jihadists continue to virally spread their unopposed narrative that "American society, government, and media are against Islam and against Muslims."
As a nation, we have been missing in action in the war of ideas. We continue to give the victim-mongering Islamist groups in America a giant pass on how recklessly they facilitate that same victim-obsessed narrative which feeds the minds of future radical Islamists. The arc of radicalization will only accelerate until the American Muslim community develops a palpable pro-liberty, anti-Islamist response. This war of ideas has been nearly impossible with much of the media, government, and academe unwilling to engage in the tough work of theo-political discussions of necessary Muslim reform. Muslim youth and young adults will continue to be susceptible to the separatist jihadist ideas of radical Islamists unless we provide alternative liberty-based winning ideas for their identification with this nation. Already, many (including Sec. Janet Napolitano) are rushing to say that this Faisal Shahzad, the first one arrested so far in this incident, was basically a "lone-wolf."
Whether he ends up being connected to a militant jihadist Pakistani network or not, he is not a lone wolf. The ideas that drove him to act did not hatch in his own mind. We ignore to our own detriment the common ideology, the common malignant virus of the slippery slope of political Islam that takes over these Muslims. When are we going to collectively wake up as a nation? We need to begin to saturate the domestic and foreign messages in the media and online available to young Muslims seeking the "truth" with one based in the need to reform, to separate mosque and state and teach an inherent loyalty to Americanism, Constitutionalism and the central belief in the Establishment Clause of our republic over Islamism while they can also be devout Muslims. Anything else is short-sighted and continues to leave us intellectually unarmed against the Islamists who will only hatch more and more attacks as we remain missing in action in the war of ideas.