Analysis: What Should we do about the ISIS threat to the U.S.?

An Ounce of Prevention

For City Journal, Myron Magnet writes: When a British-educated Muslim terrorist beheads an American journalist to display the sentiments of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria toward the United States; when photos of a Chicago office building and the White House appear on social media with hard-to-deny evidence in the pictures that ISIS is here in our own country with ill intent; when a peace-preaching imam in Canada reports that ISIS is recruiting among his flock; when an experienced U.S. senator warns of ISIS plans to blow up an American city; and when a top ex-intelligence officer cautions that ISIS terrorists have “very likely” entered the United States along with the flood of illegal immigrants surging through our southern border, what would a responsible president do?

[Check out Myron Magnet’s book “The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817“ at Amazon]

Surely, for starters, he would use the National Guard to seal the border with Mexico, as a matter of national security, let alone national sovereignty. He would surely order the Transportation Security Administration to stop at once allowing illegal aliens to board commercial airliners without the usual government-issued identification, as is now reportedly happening routinely, perhaps allowing terrorists to move freely throughout the nation. He would order the FBI to track down illegals who are already here, and at the very least deport the suspicious and the criminal, and he would aid and encourage local law-enforcement agencies to do the same thing, rather than hinder them.

He would insist that all legal roadblocks against scrutinizing jihadist websites and social media be cleared away, and he would then monitor vigilantly, sending investigators where appropriate….(read more)

City Journal

Myron Magnet is editor-at-large of City Journal, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and the author of The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817, recently published by W. W. Norton.