EDITORIAL: It's time to fight back against Islamic terror

Charlie Hebdo. The Bataclan theatre massacre. San Bernardino. And now Brussels.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the common thread between all these shootings and bombings — Islamic terrorism.

Nor does it take any brilliant analysis to determine that preventing such terror in the future will only be possible if the West stops coddling the sensibilities of Islamic immigrants and holds them responsible for the mayhem they have unleashed.

Consider this: According to a new report from the Associated Press, ISIS (also known as the Islamic State) has trained at least 400 fighters “to target Europe in deadly waves of attacks, deploying interlocking terror cells like the ones that struck Brussels and Paris with orders to choose the time, place and method for maximum chaos.”

If Europeans don’t want to get used to the idea of being blown up whenever they travel by train or by plane — if they don’t want to tolerate women being raped by gangs of men who don’t believe women have rights — if they don’t want to surrender their cultural identity to the religious demands of Islam, then it is time to strike back.

Nor should we consider the United States somehow immune to the threat of fundamental Islam. While the uncontrolled mass migration of millions of Muslims into Europe has made countries like France, Belgium, Sweden and Germany particularly ripe for terror attacks, there is absolutely nothing protecting the United States either — as the Fort Hood shooter, the Chattanooga massacre, the Boston Marathon bombers and the San Bernardino shooters all prove.

President Obama may think that it’s business as usual — as his visit to a baseball game in Cuba following the bloody toll in Brussels suggests — but the American people need to demand a change in attitude from their leaders. Business as usual is killing us.

Now, it’s time for the United States and its allies to officially declare war on the Islamic State and get busy putting its fighters in their graves before they do the same to us.