I spent the first six hours of today seeing to neglected administrative tasks – cleansing my inboxes of the thousands of emails languishing there (and no, I haven’t gotten back to all of you yet – feel free to follow up if you are waiting on something from me), processing checks from our donors (thank you!), visiting the post office and bank, keeping a close eye on the ever-more-volatile discussions in our comment boxes.

This is why nothing has been posted yet today, and it may not happen (other than this) before quitting time. I am trying to force myself to accept my limitations. I literally can only do one thing at a time, and every time I try to multitask, nothing gets done. Which is why I was entering checks from September on November 16th.

While I was out running errands, I stopped in at our local coffee shop to grab a bag of life blood for writers beans from our neighborhood roastery. A young man sitting at the counter was lamenting that he was out walking around at 3AM — not drinking, not doing anything untoward, just walking — and he was stopped and questioned by police two separate times.

“Um, you heard about the attacks in Paris, right?” The barista asked. “They’re cracking down. I read that ISIS released a statement about their ‘five year plan’…they want to hit Los Angeles, Virginia, DC…”

I nodded in agreement from my place in line.

“And they think some of the attackers were Syrian refugees.” The barista went on. “They’re coming in as refugees.”

“One of the guys, the mastermind behind the attack,” said the man standing in front of me in line, “was apparently from Belgium.”

I nodded again. “Brussels,” I offered. “They’re very good at hiding. Every mosque has radicals.  And whenever there’s an attack, what do you hear people say? ‘Oh, he was such a nice guy. He worked with me. He was my neighbor.'”

At that moment, two women walked in, chatting and laughing, and the conversation spontaneously ceased. The men in the room were aware, on edge; the women seemed likely to present an argument or objection nobody wanted to deal with at that moment. The unspoken agreement flashed around the shop by way of meaningful glances. I bought my coffee and walked out.

People are on notice. People are concerned. There’s going to be a lot of dissection of what happened in Paris on Friday night. France is already conducting air strikes, which give everyone a case of the feels, a big fist pump for vengeance.

But France’s problem is a domestic Islamic community that is so powerful, there are no-go zones where even French law enforcement fears to tread. When are they going to launch tactical strikes on those? When are they going to start mass deportations? Ann Barnhardt, quoting Osama bin Laden, says that Islam isn’t even a religion – it’s totalitarian political system that requires submission from all non-adherents:

Islam isn’t about “allah” or “paradise” or “prayer” or “spirituality” or how human beings should relate to one another or how human beings should relate to a “god” or the eternal fate of the human soul. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THAT. Islam is about acquiring physical, earthly territory and installing a totalitarian government over the earth that provides a cadre of “elites” masquerading as some sort of “clergy” with massive decadent wealth and as much twisted perverted sex as they want, including homosexual and heterosexual pedohilia, ephebophilia, concubinage, incest, bestiality and necrophilia. There is nothing new under the sun. They want power, they want money and they want sex. The “religious” aspects are a stone-cold con, which Bin Laden himself declared in no uncertain terms.

2. They can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be dialogued with. There is no such thing as “radical islam”. There is islam, which is even more bloodthirsty, conscienceless and perverse than what we are seeing today. We cannot possibly imagine what they would do if given true carte-blanche. Islam today is like an eleven year old boy – just BARELY on the cusp of puberty, just BEGINNING to test the waters. These beheadings, rapes, suicide attacks and terror operations are BUSH LEAGUE. Just as it is nonsensical and depraved to refer to Nazis as “radical Nazis” and “moderate Nazis” – as if ANY Nazism could ever be considered acceptable, so it is with Islam.

I’m not sure I buy that it’s not a religion. I thin it’s a very dangerous religious/political fusion, suffused with preternatural qualities that make it incredibly dangerous. But if the rest of Ann’s assessment is true — and all the evidence points to the fact that it is — every Muslim community represents a threat. My friend Andrew Bieszad, a scholar intimately aquainted with all the texts and teachings of Islam — keeps repeating to me that every Muslim is capable of being radicalized. The more devoted they become to their beliefs, the more likely that they will become the nice guy. The one you worked with in IT. The one who shot up the local preschool, yelling Allahu Akbar!

Speaking of Andrew, I did a podcast with him on Saturday about the Paris attacks. The audio is a bit muddy – my apologies, as it was a rush to catch him coming off a 14 hour night shift and we had to conduct the interview via cell phone — but it’s worth listening to anyway.

Andrew is also releasing a kindle version of his book, Lions of the Faith: Saints, Blesseds, and Heroes of the Catholic Faith in the Struggle with Islam. The physical copies were limited runs and kept selling out. This version is cheaper, never sells out, and available for pre-order now.

I haven’t read it in a few years, but I also just dusted off my copy of Robert Spencer’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades). Your mileage may vary, but I remember it being a real eye-opener for the uninitiated, which I was when I read it.

And for those of you who have read it, yes, I’m aware of Pope Francis’s answer to the question of whether Lutherans should be able to receive the Eucharist. No, it’s not good. I hope to get to that soon.