Lessons from Paris

The Paris terror attacks of November 13, 2015, were an abomination that have left much of the world in tears. Last Friday, teams of ISIS terrorists attacked six different locations throughout the city with suicide bombings and mass shootings, ultimately killing 129 and leaving 352 injured. The Islam-motivated strike has created a ripple effect on policy debates, with the homeland security brain trusts worldwide working around the clock to prevent a repeat of Paris in their own countries. For the United States specifically, two major ramifications have developed as a result of Paris: first, the president’s Syrian refugee proposal is a national security risk and must be ceased immediately; second, ISIS is now the greatest threat to Western civilization, and the U.S. must lead to quickly and decisively thwart the terror network if we wish to prevent repeat attacks.

One of the most appalling but least shocking pieces of information to emerge from the Paris aftermath was that at least two of the terrorists exploited the Syrian refugee crisis to enter Europe. The terrorists arrived in Greece posing as refugees, where they were hastily processed and then able to move throughout the European Union untracked. Newspapers were reporting on ISIS’s exploitation of the migrant crisis months before but Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, David Cameron and Alexis Tsipras put their bleeding hearts before the safety of the people they represent, blindly welcoming hundreds of thousands of Syrians into Europe. All the technology and collaboration in the world is not enough to properly screen Syrian refugees who, to their own detriment post-Paris, must be looked at the same way as ISIS terrorists in the eyes of our national security policy.

Paris should be a wakeup call to the United States, where President Obama has aggressively ramped up accepting Syrian refugees, bringing anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 into the country this year. On Monday, the president reiterated his commitment to importing refugees into the nation, promising to subject them to the same "rigorous screening and security checks” the Paris attackers went through. Among these refugees are certainly ISIS-radicalized or potently dangerous ISIS-sympathetic individuals, who are capitalizing on our poor immigration enforcement and generosity to mount Trojan-horse style acts of war. America’s tradition of refugee acceptance is ripe with compassion but, if applied to the Syrian crisis, wrought with stupidity. We do not have the capability to monitor the actions and motivations of the Syrian people our president has promised to import. The duty of the U.S. government is first and foremost the good and welfare of the American people, and accepting Syrian refugees is a direct dereliction of that responsibility. Thankfully, a bipartisan coalition of state leaders agree with me—with, at the time of publication, 30 governors telling the White House that their state is not open for refugee resettlement.

The U.S. can, however, still help those who are truly hopeless and stuck in the middle of conflict between Syria’s President Assad and ISIS thugs. An idea slowly increasing in popularity is to create a “safe zone” within Syrian borders where neither Assad nor ISIS will have any access or influence. The U.S. should exhibit leadership and commit every world power to contribute to this effort. Securing a significant safe zone within Syria allows the world to protect innocent lives in a civil war without compromising their own security by accepting refugees.

In addition to the refugee crisis, the other critical outcome of Paris is that ISIS has established itself as the greatest security threat to both the United States and Western world at large. ISIS is well-funded, controls significant assets (oil) and stockpiles of weapons and benefits from leaders well-equipped in military strategy and operations. They have a new, significant medium—the Internet—that allows ISIS to recruit and radicalize around the globe, without physical human contact. The battle with ISIS is not war with an organization but rather a caliphate; conflict with ISIS is an epic clash of ideology and civilization, a grand departure from the past demands of Al Qaeda to simply rid the middle east of American influence. Thus, it is imperative the U.S. act quickly to remove ISIS; they are not interested in peaceful coexistence and will continue to pound the West with pre-emptive terrorist attacks until the whole world is an Islamic state.

Therefore, we must drastically change our strategy of combating ISIS from containment to demolition. First, we eliminate the power source: To borrow a line from the Donald, we should start by bombing “the hell out of ISIS”—the oil Obama abandoned in Iraq is their chief money supply, and must be controlled immediately. Then we should work with the Kurds, the Jordanians and Western Europe to launch a full assault on ISIS controlled land. Simultaneously, we must also do a better job of tracking ISIS recruiting and “lone wolf” militants and cells. Countries need to aggressively consolidate and share intelligence, launch a counter-propaganda offensive online and increase surveillance in areas susceptible to ISIS networking. The United States should pass Senator Ted Cruz’s Expatriate Terrorist Act, which revokes the citizenship/residency of Americans who go overseas to support or fight for terrorists—an action that would have prevented the Boston Marathon Bombings.

Unfortunately, ISIS has cemented itself as a serious threat to U.S. national security. The Paris terrorist attacks demonstrate a drastic need to secure the borders and do a better job of monitoring who’s coming into the states and why. Additionally, we need to obliterate ISIS—fast. ISIS is no terror organization but rather a terror-state, and the safety of the West depends on the Islamic State’s speedy destruction.

Max Schreiber is a Pratt senior. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.