To avoid letting the terrorists win, make them lose

If ISIS really does want a fight, it may still be right to give them one.

CNN’s Sally Kohn has today been kind enough to provide us all with a perfectly distilled example of what, post-Paris, has become a popular progressive talking point. “Y’all realize,” Kohn wrote on Twitter this morning, that “ISIS wants to provoke a war, right? If we go to war, we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.”

Assurances such as Kohn’s have been forthcoming since before the blood dried. In Saturday’s Independent, Sunny Mundal suggested that the West will only “win if we don’t get provoked into the response they want from us.” And what do “they want”? First, for us to “to attack them on their soil: in Iraq and Syria,” thereby creating a “backlash that would would play directly into their hands”; second, to “create division and exploit tension in our modern multi-racial societies,” and thus to cause “western Muslims to feel that they can only truly be at home at the Isis Caliphate.” If we react by going after them, Mundal predicted, we will only “create countless new recruits.” In yesterday’s Huffington Post, Nick Robins-Early made a similar argument, submitting that if Western nations respond to the abomination in Paris by slowing down the influx of refugees — or even by talking favorably about “Western civilization” — they will be playing directly “into the hands of extremists.”