Ilana Mercer

He adopted the religion of peace and forthwith proceeded to shatter the peace of his countrymen.

In the waning months of 2014, Quebecer Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in the back, at Canada’s National War Memorial in Ottawa. Zehaf-Bibeau then stormed Parliament, but was dispatched by a sergeant-at-arms before he could do further harm.

The mother of the martyr, Susan Bibeau, is a “deputy chairperson of a division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board.” Mrs. Bibeau has done quite well as a Canadian bureaucrat, acquiring “homes in Montreal and Ottawa.” Her errant son told mommy dearest of “his desire to travel to Syria,” a fact she revealed only after the butcher’s bill came due; following Zehaf-Bibeau’s lone-wolf, wilding rampage on Parliament Hill.

Why would a convert to Islam want to travel to Syria? To visit the ruins? And why would a Canadian civil servant, who described her son as a misfit, not report Zehaf-Bibeau’s destination of choice to the authorities? In any event, it transpires that said authorities had been investigating Zehaf-Bibeau, but had yet to determine whether or not to confiscate his passport.

Before Michael Zehaf-Bibeau came another Quebecer called Martin Couture-Rouleau. Like Bibeau, Rouleau went to war with his countrymen upon converting to Islam. He rammed his car into two Canadian Forces members near Montreal, one of whom died of his injuries.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Couture-Rouleau was known to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, and had been closely monitored. These authorities were confident that Couture-Rouleau and 90 other suspected extremists “intended to join militants fighting abroad.”

So what did the Canadian security apparatus do to forestall an attack on Canadian soil? First, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police staged an intervention. The Mounties tried to “talk Couture-Rouleau down” from his murderous mindset. Convinced that the therapeutic intervention succeeded, the Mounties then stopped monitoring him. Oh, and they also took away Couture-Rouleau’s passport.

The New Year brought us the Brothers Kouachi, who carried out the assassinations at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris. The brothers ate, slept and breathed “radical Islam.” (is there any other?)

When Chérif Kouachi was not making a dash for Jihad Central in Syria—only to be stopped and arrested by the foolish French—or planning jail breaks for other Jihadis; he was recruiting French Muslims for no other than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Iraqi operation. Al-Zarqawi is the fellow who had been admonished by Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s Capo Bastone) for being too … ruthless. Yes, Chérif’s mentors and compadres inhabited the revolving door of mosque and prison.

As to Saïd Kouachi: Other than welfare, the only thing he earned in France were frequent-flyer miles to Yemen. There he hung out with the would-be underwear bomber and the American al Qaeda preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki.

The Russian state security had informed the FBI and CIA that one of Boston’s own, Tamerlan Tsarnaev of the Boston Bombers Team Tsarnaev, undertook similar “vocational” training in Dagestan. The agencies, however, were more concerned about keeping terrorist tourism alive, than keeping Americans in the land of the living.

The point here is not to belabor well-known, accepted outrages. Instead, I’d like to float a modest proposal.

The Canadian government continues to “revoke passports from extremists so as to prevent them from traveling to-and-fro Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State (ISIS).” Oddly, the same government will often opt to charge Jihad-minded men with “attempting to leave Canada to participate in terrorist activity.”

Why?

Revoking a home-based Jihadist’s travel documents is worse than dumb; it is a dereliction of duty. It demonstrates that whatever it does, the state acts irrationally—and certainly against the interests of those whose safety it has been entrusted to protect.

Naturally, no individual should be arrested for harboring wicked thoughts or hanging with wicked people. But when he leaves the Occident with the intent to train to wage war on his neighbors—this Jihadi must be stopped from re-entering the good country.

Let the West’s homegrown Jihadis wander from the killing fields of one crap country to another, like the nomadic hired guns they are.

By nature, this modest proposal is defensive (not to mention decisive) and, thus, eminently libertarian.

There are well over 3,000 Western fighters that have traveled to assist ISIS and its offshoots in forging a caliphate. They return with murder on their minds. They must not be allowed back into Western countries.

Citizenship is nothing more than a political grant of government privilege; a positive, state-minted right. Citizenship is not a natural right. Yet these state-stamped licenses—citizenship and attendant travel documents—are honored, at the cost of innocent lives.

Alas, the Monster State is inherently both stupid and evil. Like a primitive organism, it answers to nobody and nothing but its reflexive need to grow.

To wit, the Monster State refuses to protect its people from plagues. It welcomes high-risk travelers from the Ebola hot-zones. Simultaneously, it quarantines aspiring fighters for Jihad here at home, in the West, so the homeland is the only arena in which they can act-out.

The nightwatchman state of classical liberalism would keep killers out of the country, not in the country.

ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the United States. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a contributor to the preeminent libertarian site Economic Policy Journal and to Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence. Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank. Ilana’s latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com.