The jihadists hope to flood the north African state [Libya] with militiamen from Syria and Iraq, who will then sail across the Mediterranean posing as migrants on people trafficking vessels, according to plans seen by Quilliam, the British anti-extremist group.

The fighters would then run amok in southern European cities and also try to attack maritime shipping.

Libya, which under the dictator Qaddafi had joined the U.S. efforts to stem Islamic terrorism, is now a chaotic no-man’s-land where Islamists seem likely to seize control of a vast, oil-rich country only 300 miles by sea from Europe. The U.S. and NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” in Libya appears to be a catastrophe, according to Alan J. Kuperman of Foreign Affairs, who argues that even the “massacres” which Qaddafi was accused of committing or contemplating were mostly invented — pieces of sophisticated propaganda designed to stoke Western intervention through the media.

If the US is serious about stopping ISIS from conquering more of the Arab world and North Africa and launching a refugee crisis in Europe as a cover for flooding our allies with terrorists, it will have to abandon the daydream that every country — or any country — in the Muslim world is just one U.S. invasion and one free election away from turning into Switzerland. We may have to cooperate with dictators such as Assad in Syria and El-Sisi in Egypt to help them crush ISIS by force. We shouldn’t delude ourselves: they are not our friends; but they lack the imperialistic zeal of ISIS and share with us a common and much more malignant enemy.

Europe is in more immediate danger than the US for obvious historical and geographical reasons. It has been a target of Islamic aspirations for centuries, and it is again a plausible target, though the first wave of the invasion force is camouflaged in a flood of refugees, which will look quite different once a critical mass of Islamist voters are in place, and can impose Sharia law.

Crazy conspiracy talk? One out of four residents of Brussels under age 20 is of “Islamic origin.” In other cities, the colonization has proceeded even more quickly, aided and abetted by generous social welfare programs that offer immigrants a comfortable life in Germany or England for the price of showing up.

The West must abandon the pretense that what we defend are only vague universal values such as “tolerance,” “freedom,” democracy” or “human rights.” No, we defend our countries and their citizens, including their religious, political and property rights. Our enemy is more specific than just “terrorism,” “violent extremism,” or “intolerance.”  It is a weaponized form of political Islam, an ideology that our increasingly privatized view of “religion” fails to capture. Every statement that does not acknowledge that fact is an instance of either appeasement or naiveté.

But what about the refugees Pope Francis spoke of at Lampedusa, many of whom were in fact innocent, apolitical Muslims? Thousands of them drowned in search not of Islamic supremacy but of a better life in Europe. As we have seen, jihadist groups are already planning to use those refugees to smuggle in “sleeper” terrorist cells. Even genuinely peaceful Muslim immigrants entering Europe provide ready recruits for radicalization, inside the mosques of Europe, which Saudi money is building and staffing with clerics whose views are hardly different from those of ISIS. For Europeans, this means that the moment for hard choices on Muslim immigration is fast approaching, if it has not already passed.

None of the political parties now in power in Europe are ready to face the threat squarely. But there are parties ready and willing to take up the gauntlet and defend their countries’ real and legitimate interests, instead of their adolescent idealist fantasies. We are only a few more terrorist strikes away from a genuine political revolution in Europe. Let us pray that it happens peacefully, and that Christian-inspired norms of human dignity restrain these nations when they finally act in their own self-defense.

The longer these nations wait, and the more desperate the crisis, the less likely their governments are to obey such crucial moral imperatives. The last time the West was in a situation this desperate, we allied with Josef Stalin, terror-bombed cities like Dresden and Hiroshima, and unjustly interned innocent Japanese-Americans in camps. God forbid that we become that ruthless once again.