The Islamic State of Mind

    I first heard the news on the radio while driving home from work late last Friday afternoon.
    "Oh no,"   I pleaded with no one,  "please don't let it be!"
     A few minutes later a friend texted:  "TURN ON THE TV:  There is ongoing terrorism spread out all over Paris.  100 hostages at a Paris rock concert too."
     I didn't turn on the TV.  Not right away.  I didn't want to see it.  I didn't want it to believe it was true until there was no denying that it was. 
      Now once again people all over the world are united in our horror, our grief, our anger, our fear, and our hearts go out once again, too soon, to our French brothers and sisters.
       And yet my oldest daughter offered what I fear may be a prescient observation.  She said, "Sad as I am over the what happened in Paris, I'm more sad over what will follow."
     Yesterday France launched massive U.S. - coordinated airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria, an escalation of all the bombs we've already dumped there and in Iraq in hopes of wiping out a force that moves in that region like an infestation of cockroaches and  travels the globe as invisibly and infectiously as a deadly virus.
      Think:  The media-loving murderer "Jihadi John" was a British citizen.
      The Charlie Hebdo killers were French.
      The car-bombers in Beirut last week were Syrian and Lebanese.
      The problem is that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria isn't the country of  Iraq or the country of Syria or, at this point, any country.  The Islamic State is no more a geographical state than it is Islam.
         In truth  the Islamic State is a state of mind, a destructive ideology driving a movement that continues to recruit across the globe by means of social media among the lost, marginalized, poor, disaffected and emotionally alienated, creating in them not only a mentality that celebrates brutality and the murder of others but their own death as well.
        So how do you bomb an ideology?
        How do you make war on a global network?
        How do you change a state of mind?