“You exterminate them, and you leave behind smoking building and crying widows.”

This can’t end well.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the rallying cry that all Muslims are the enemy is once again being trumpeted.  The temptation to buy into the extremist Islamist notion that there must be a an all-out war between all of Islam and the West is picking up steam and gaining advocates on this side of the fence. And troublingly, its not just from the predictable Michelle Bachmann/Frank Gaffney/Michael Savage ultra-nut job quarters.

Yesterday on Fox’s Sunday morning show, RINO and Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsey Graham noted that “we are at war,” saying specifically that the attack in France was not a crime but a skirmish in a religious war we refuse to acknowledge.  This was a continuation of a talking point Graham has been repeating all week. On Wednesday he actually went further on the Hugh Hewitt show, saying that we needed to stop thinking of these attacks as being perpetrated by terrorists and accept the fact that we are at war with Islam. And although Graham notably refused to step over the line to demand we declare war on all Muslims home and abroad, there were others ready to pick up the slack.

Friday afternoon Rupert Murdoch took to the social media airwaves and declared peaceful-schmeaceful, we needed to hold all Muslims everywhere responsible for acts of terrorism committed by Islamic extremists.

It is probably no coincidence, then, that on Murdoch’s own network that very evening Fox News Strategic Analyst Ralph Peters was invited to advocate the following:

One, you accept that you are in a war. Two, you name the enemy: Islamist terrorists. Three, you get the lawyers off the battlefield and out of the targeting cell. You accept there will be collateral damage, and do you not apologize for it, you do not nation build. You don’t hold — try to hold ground. You go wherever in the world the terrorists are and you kill them. You do your best to exterminate them, and then you leave, and you leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows. If in five or ten years they reconstitute and you have got to go back, you go back and you do the same thing and you never never never send American troops into a war you don’t mean to win… Be as merciless as the enemy, if you’re not willing to do that, they will win.

At the same time, the network invited Islamic “expert” Steven Emerson to tell American viewers that Muslims had taken over many British cities such as Birmingham and large swaths of London, that in these cities it was illegal to be not Muslim, and that the police would beat you if you were not in full and proper Muslim dress.  No, really:

This came as something of a shock to Great Britain, whose own Prime Minister reacted to the news by declaring, “Oh my God, how did we let this happen?” “This guy is a complete idiot.”  (FWIW Christians actually outnumber Muslims 2:1 in Birmingham, and in a totally un-Fox move Emerson has already admitted he was making it up and apologized.)

Almost as telling as who Fox chose to have on air that night is the story they chose not to cover: that of Lassana Bathily, the young Muslim shop worker who risked his own life to protect fifteen people shopping in a Kosher market.  Nor did the network mention any of these 45 examples (complied by Altnet) of Muslim organizations and leaders speaking out in no uncertain terms against the Paris attack, including CAIR, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Arab League, and, well, 41 others.

And just to make sure there is no misunderstanding about the scope of the problem here, I turn finally to Rand Paul, that famed GOP anti-hawk and champion of capital-L Liberty. When told that the New York Times editorial board urged citizens not to “smear all Muslims with a terrorist brush,” Paul laughed and said “they must be totally deaf and dumb.”

Last week I noted that there was a reason the White House needed to be careful how it spoke about Muslim terrorism in a way it did not have to with North Korean terrorism.  As I said at the time,

there is, as far as I have ever seen, heard, or read, no instances where Americans are glancing suspiciously at their Korean-Americans neighbors and demanding a price be paid for the actions of Kim Jong-Un.  Major news networks do not insist that we treat all Korean-Americans as suspect and enemies of the state.  Korean-Americans do not have to worry if their neighbors will have their churches shut down, or indeed burned to the ground by concerned citizens.  Korean-Americans do not go onto Facebook to see their locally elected officials making light, “funny” comments about how they need to be shot, nor do they have to walk by town-hall Tea Party rallies declaring them “evil.”  No pundit one from a major political blog, think tank, or publishing house is rushing to argue that we forcibly intern all Korean-Americans.

And now it appears that our very worst impulses have sadly proven me prophetically correct.  It was just six years ago that the top GOPer on the House Intelligence Committee had admitted that, in hindsight, the phrase “war on terror” probably was “the dumbest term.. you could use.”  Two weeks ago I think we would have mostly all agreed that refusing to let Muslim-Americans build a mosque in Tennessee or boycotting a show that depicted them as ordinary people rather than evil personified was a wave of silliness that had overcome us momentarily.  And yet here we are again, a year before the next presidential election, and the desire to make all Muslims the Enemy as a call to the voting booth appears too tempting to resist.

As I said at the beginning, this can’t end well.

[Picture: Screenshot of Rupert Murdoch’s Twitter page.]

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