Even the Nice places in the world getting caught up in Muslim madness

A little more than seven years ago, my wife and I went to Europe.

It was far from our first trip and it wasn't our last. We spent most of the first week in London for a scientific conference and then flew to the Cote d'Azur for three or four days. Our son Virgile was 24 that summer and was competing in his first Ironman Triathlon -- in a city called Nice.

If I remember correctly, an Ironman starts with a 2.2 mile swim in open water, transitions to a 115-mile bicycle ride and then finishes with a 26.2 mile run. Think of how difficult that would be, and then think of running into the water with several thousand other starters at the same time.

Imagine running into the Mediterranean at 6 a.m. Then once you're in the water it's nearly impossible to move your arms or legs without hitting another person.

But he did it, and moved on to the next two stages, each of them including a thoroughfare known as the Boulevard des Anglais.

Yeah, that Boulevard des Anglais.

Virgile in Nice, 2009

When I learned of the terrorist attack July 14th in Nice, it made me very sad to think that it had happened in a place that had yielded some wonderful memories for my family. It wasn't the first place I had been where terrorists later attacked. I had lunch in Windows on the World on the 107th floor of WTC 1 in 1979, and I have been in the London Underground numerous times.


But Nice was different. Nice was the site of something wonderful in my son's life, which made it something wonderful in my life.

But it never stops these days. The front page of the Daily Telegraph lists the names of cities where terrorists have attacked. I've been in four of them. Nice and Paris in France and Orlando and San Bernardino in this country.

Hell, I worked in San Bernardino.

It would be difficult to deny that this is a religious thing. Every single one of the attacks has been connected with radical Islam. But how do you deal with religious terrorists while still protecting the rights of peaceful practitioners of the religion?

Certainly Islam isn't the only religion plagued by terrorists, but there aren't any other major faiths that have a whole wing of their believers dedicated to killing infidels.

So what do we do? At one point in its history, England banished all Jews from the British Isles, a banishment that lasted several hundred years.

Of course, there are about 16 million Jews in the world. As of 2010 there were 1.6 billion Muslims, 100 times as many. How do you deal with a religion that makes up 23 percent of the world's population?

The sheer number of Muslims is staggering. If only one percent sympathizes with the terrorists, that's 16 million people. And if only one percent of that one percent would actually do something, that's still 160,000 potential terrorists.

And let's not be naive. The first number -- the sympathizers -- is higher than one percent. Just look at surveys in the United Kingdom and the U.S. and you'll see that a lot more than one percent would like to live under sharia law.

Politicians like Newt Gingrich say we should interview every American Muslim and ask them how they feel about sharia law. At the same time, though, Gingrich says there are too many people to make that practicable. Forgive me for thinking Newt's suggestions are useless as they always were.

One way to attack the terror element is to do the same thing we did when we went after organized crime in the 1930s -- dry up their money. We absolutely have to make it more difficult for rich Arabs -- particularly the Saudi royal family -- to pay what is in essence protection money to terror groups.

France has actually been tougher than most countries, which is probably why the French have been targets so often. They actually banned the wearing of hijabs in public. Unlike Britain, which has practically ceded control of some Muslim neighborhoods to the Muslims themselves.

How do you solve a problem when the people on one side play by the law and are civilized in their interactions and those on the other want to win through the use of intimidation and murder?

Society only works when everyone lives by certain basic rules. One of the most basic is live and let live. We don't kill people because they don't follow the same moral path we do. We certainly have folks on the Religious Right who can be annoying, but they're not killing folks because they don't pray to the right God.

We've got more than enough trouble with non-religious murders.

When it comes to sharia law, we really cannot give an inch.