Last week, Islamofascists turned Paris, the city of love, into a city of blood. In a video seen repeatedly after their Charlie Hebdo massacre, the terrorists murdered a policeman, who was already hit, already waving his hands in surrender. Ahmed Merabet, a cop who was a fellow Muslim, asked, “Are you going to kill me?” And the terrorists did – showing what kind of people they are.

Last week they made it clear: yes, they are going to kill you if you are a police officer, just doing your job; they are going to kill you if you are a satirist, expressing your freedom to be outrageous and provocative and even wrong sometimes; and, yes, they are going to kill you if you are a Jew shopping for Shabbat.

These killers had much broader targets, of course. Once again, the Islamo-killers of 9/11 and 7/7 and Ottawa and Jerusalem and Bali and Madrid showed that they are going to kill you if you disagree with them, if you love freedom, if you refuse to join their sick holy war against democracy and liberty.

We must stop kidding ourselves that if we only appease them, if we just meet their demands, they will somehow stop. As long as we live and love and prosper and thrive in the West, they will fight us.

Of course, the more we live and love and prosper and thrive – and fight – the closer we come to defeating them, understanding that total victory is the only acceptable possible outcome against these totalitarian fascists, just as it was the only acceptable outcome against the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s.

We must target the terrorists, their handlers, financiers, trainers and mentors. They must be hunted down and punished, using the full power of western democracies fighting an existential war of self-defence. These killers displayed their training and conditioning – training in the skilled, disciplined way they went about slaughtering fellow human beings, and conditioning, in the cold, dehumanization of others required for armed people to shoot unarmed writers, shoppers and police officers. These acts don’t emerge naturally from poverty or discrimination, or even, “occupation.” The Islamo-fascism we face is calculated, cultivated, conditioned and peculiar to Islamist civilization and ideology.

We must denounce Islamofascist ideology without inhibition. The fight against Islamoterrorism is a form of ideological warfare requiring moral clarity. Pretending that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam insults our intelligence, just as any resulting bigotry toward individual Muslim violates our ideals. We celebrate the martyred Muslim police office Ahmed Merabet. We honour Lassana Bathily, the Muslim clerk at the Hyper Cacher grocery store who ushered customers into a safe space in the basement. And, unlike our opponents, we treat every individual with dignity.

But those acts of respect – which come naturally to us – must not stop us from confronting Islamist ideology, and demanding that our non-Islamofascist Muslim brothers and sisters take responsibility for their co-religionists’ acts. They must take back Islam from the Islamists.

We need to hear of imams using their mosques to preach tolerance and respect, not terrorism and revenge. We need to hear of curriculum reform in schools throughout the Muslim world, including in Canada, purging medieval teachings that demonize the infidel, the Jew, the Zionist, the American, the Canadian, the Christian, the westerner. We need to hear of Muslims walking out on preachers who are too extreme, boycotting schools inculcating evil, rather than supporting hate-mongers, indulging them and covering for them. We need to hear of crackdowns on the flow of money and ideology from fundamentalist centres in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere that encourage hatred, then hide that hatred behind false charges of “Islamophobia.” We need to hear of Muslim moderates mobilizing and putting these Islamic fundamentalists on the defensive – ideologically, intellectually, socially, politically and militarily.

Meanwhile, we westerners must free ourselves from what cultural theorist David Harris calls our culture of guilt vis-a-vis their culture of blame. We should embrace what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called our imperfect democracies over their absolute dictatorships. We should stop perfuming Islamo-fascism with our shame regarding western shortcomings. For too long, attacks on Western racism, imperialism and colonialism, along with attacks on Israeli actions regarding the Palestinians, have been used to rationalize terrorism. Let’s be clear: terrorizing innocents is unacceptable, whatever your perceived injustice.

And we should reinforce our words with actions. When terrorists kill to punish cartoonists, the CBC, the Montreal Gazette, the New York Times and all other media outlets must publish their work. We all then should forward the cartoons on social media, even if we find them tasteless, offensive, bigoted or wrongheaded. Our actions must show that freedom for the thought we hate is a defining principle of the western freedom that is under attack, and that we are defending what we believe in by proactively practising it publicly.

In the random roulette wheel of modern life, terrorists murdered 17 good people in Paris. We will win if hundreds of millions of us take the threat personally and fight back passionately, showing Islamofascists that every time they kill, they recruit millions more opponents rather than intimidating any of us. 

Gil Troy is a CJN columnist and professor of history at McGill University.

Voir Aussi: Jours noirs pour les Juifs de France