The question was asked by Adolph Hitler in August of 1944 after ordering his military governor/general Dietrich von Choltitz to destroy the City of Lights rather than have it fall into the hands of General George Patton’s Third Army, just miles away from liberating the heart and soul of France.

Is Paris burning? Such was the title of my essay posted on November 14, 2015. Is Paris burning? I asked. I was referring to a fiery attack the previous evening outside the national stadium by three suicide bombers during an international football match. Another group of attackers simultaneously fired on crowded cafés and restaurants downtown, with one of them detonating a bomb, killing himself in the process. They weren’t done. A third group carried out a mass shooting and took hostages at a concert venue attended by 1,500 people in a historic theatre. It was Friday the 13th, an unlucky day for the 130 who perished, and the over 400 who were wounded. ISIS proudly took credit, saying that it was retaliation for French airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq.

I felt that Paris, and France and Europe and indeed all of western civilization were once again in the crosshairs of madness. I saw Jihad as a disease in its early stages of metastasizing from the traditional confines of the Middle East and now headed to a town near you and me. Note that this was my observation 11 years ago.

The Ottoman Empire with Islam as the official and only religion made its bloody mark on the West from the mid-thirteenth century until World War I. The conquering Turks absorbed, adapted and modified the economics and sociologies of the lands they occupied and the cultures of the peoples they dominated. Yes, the corollary effects on literature, architecture, language and art can still be seen today from Spain to Constantinople. And yes, to some degree there was an aspect of genteel sophistication to the ways of the Sultan that may have to some degree mitigated their prejudicial brutality against Christians and Jews.

Over centuries they have never abandoned their theocratically driven objective: to erase and replace our history and Christianity with a worldwide Islamic Caliphate, one that excludes everything that we love and hold dear: our faith, our families, our freedom. Terrorist acts show the vividly true side of modern radical Islam and its agenda. What is it that we don’t understand about “Death to Infidels”?

The Eiffel Tower went dark that night, maybe saving it from being an easy target for other radicals, or maybe just to show that the joie de vivre that made Paris the exciting, romantic magnet for centuries was severely wounded.

I closed my commentary with this: Perhaps we need to acknowledge our fraternité with the shocked and mourning citizens of our oldest ally, France. Maybe now more than ever we all need to recognize and say “Je suis Paris.” I am Paris.

So, almost 11 years later, where are we, mes amis?

 Just days ago, on October 7, the FBI thwarted a planned mass shooting plot targeting the Mall of America, when they arrested Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, an 18-year-old Minnesota man who pledged allegiance, again, to ISIS and intended to murder innocent shoppers. The fanaticism continues.

Today Paris is burning. The original protests which began two weeks ago have now devolved into uncontrolled rioting. The BBC reports that it’s all driven by anger over a decades-long teacher staffing shortage, overcrowded classrooms, and neglected school buildings. Well, I don’t hear the crowd shouting “Pour de meilleures ecoles!” (For better schools). They’re waving Palestinian flags and yelling “Allahu akbar.”

What we are witnessing on the newscasts now is an example of the inarguable Biblical principle of sowing and reaping. What would a government, a society, a culture expect to grow and flourish as a result of uncontrolled immigrants flooding into your borderless country, never to assimilate but only dedicated to the destruction of your way of life?

This type of normalized civil unrest is an engraved invitation to irrational, self-driven extremists to hijack a noble idea or a movement in order to piece together a kind of Frankensteinian Monster, animated by their bloodthirsty ambition to conquer all who stand, sit or sleep in their way. They have seized a Sol Alinsky Rules for Radicals playbook premise: Never let a good crisis go to waste. This is no ordinary posters-and-marches-in-the-streets form of civil disobedience. It is a barbarian conquest.

So how do we respond to these foreshadowing events in France? It’s not like the Nazi threat of World War II, “way over there” across the Atlantic. There is no ocean that can isolate America from radical Islam, whose stated objective is to obliterate Western civilization.

If you ever took a typing class in high school, you would have practiced with the phrase “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” Now is the time, more so than ever, to pick up our torches and pitchforks and chase the Monster out of our village, the entire Western Hemisphere. Interpret that however you want.