"To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let's march, let's march!," reads the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. On Monday, after President Francois Hollande addressed the French Parliament and declared war on Islamic terrorism, the members of both chambers spontaneously sang the anthem and chanted this 223 year-old battle cry. But can Hollande do more than just talk the talk? If he truly wants to go down in history as the man who eradicated the Islamic State group, he will have to put liberte, egalite and fraternite on the back burner to make way room for administrative detentions and aerial bombardments. At least until things calm down. This is the only way to fight terrorism. Uniformed officers should be stationed on every street corner; the French capital's two major airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, should be made to look like Ben-Gurion International Airport, and passengers who look like potential terrorists should be profiled. Plainclothes units should raid Muslim strongholds in Paris, Toulouse and Lyon, even if innocent people get hurt. What other steps will France take? Who knows. Ultimately, French troops may be sent on a covert mission to hunt down a terrorist in Malmo, Sweden. This is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, who is known for her great hostility toward Israel, will be appalled and cry foul over the fact that her nation's sovereignty was violated. France should brace for a long and exhausting journey. Terrorists will not relent and their pursuit will take a heavy toll on the country. They enjoy the element of surprise and are bound by no law or norm. France will now feel what it is like being lectured to about moral standards. Instead of Paris lecturing Israel on morality, European countries will now fault Paris for its actions. To avoid being hit by terrorists, those countries will try to explain away the attacks and assign blame on Hollande's government for not properly addressing the plight of French Muslims. They will also try to feed this false narrative with more lies. Propagandists, as usual, will try to single out one case where the authorities use excessive measures to undermine the nationwide effort to fend off terrorists. Europe has repeatedly failed to take action against evil. It failed in 1936, when Germany remilitarized of the Rhineland, and throughout the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Will it come to its senses this time around? No one knows. The real test is what happens over the coming months. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have no bearing on how successful France is, although Sweden's chief diplomat disagrees. By taking this brazen stance, she has acted as the Palestinian Authority's spokeswoman. Having said that, just because there is no linkage between our conflict and the fight against terrorism, doesn't mean the Palestinians and Israelis are correct in doing all they can to avoid talks. The war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness has reached a new level of intensity, with Islamic radicals trying to draw the Jews into the fight. There is already a word for this burgeoning clash: Armageddon.
