By Oleg Atbashian

President Obama’s White House statement on Aug. 28 was clear on two things: “ISIS must be defeated” and “we don’t have a strategy yet.”

With this in mind, let me offer a modest proposal that requires no military escalation, no additional defense spending, and no sacrifice of the American troops in the Middle East.                                                            

The president has already recognized the beheading of an American journalist as a terrorist attack on the United States and is said to be considering all options to protect Americans from the ISIS threat reaching the U.S. So let’s take him at his own word and propose that his list of “all options” should begin with (1) an end to political correctness and (2) a moratorium on pandering to immigrant groups in order to win elections for the Democrats.

Let’s call them Option One and Option Two. Like it or not, they must be in place before the president can even begin to think about protecting our borders and profiling terrorists at the airports in order to prevent any of the 3,000 members of ISIS who have U.S. or European passports from slipping into America, where they know they have an extensive and well-funded support base.

Which brings us to Option Three: extinguish their support base inside the U.S.

Limited airstrikes overseas have only limited benefits. Under the circumstances, it is similar to shooting at one tentacle of a global monster whose other tentacles have long ago worked their way into America and are recognized by the U.S. government as legitimate entities.

Terrorism in itself is never a goal, but rather a means in the arsenal of an entity whose other means include media, economic, cultural, and political manipulations that can bring down our society more effectively than terrorism alone.

It is this entity than needs to be killed, and here’s how the president can do it if he is really serious.

Let Obama continue praising Islam as a constitutionally protected religion of peace. At the same time he must outlaw Sharia, stripping this pseudo-religious practice of the First Amendment protection. The president must honestly and officially acknowledge that Sharia is, in fact, a hostile, supremacist political ideology of total domination in a purely physical, not spiritual realm.

Let me explain.

How would you like to live in a world ruled by an unelected dictator, where religious beliefs of one denomination are enforced by the state, while all other beliefs are either forbidden or subject to a heavy taxation. Women are decreed as inferior creatures by the government; they are barred from education and must cover themselves lest they invite legitimate harassment and rape by superior males. Charging interest on a loan is a crime and therefore no one gives loans, at least not openly. Music and alcohol are forbidden, but the penal code includes public amputation of arms and legs, as well as stoning to death.

It will be a world of total conformity where all thought is regimented by a few religious texts, which also regulate your daily activities, from nutrition to personal hygiene. The citizens’ highest duty is to impose their way of life on the outsiders, and the highest virtue is death in the name of these ideals. Questioning these rules is a crime and leaving the state religion means death.

What if you were promised that if you submit to such a political system, you will automatically obtain a superior “member” status with unlimited rights to dominate the inferior “non-members”? And if you were to agree, would you be able to describe your motives as purely spiritual and keep a straight face?

There is a big difference between religion (a system of faith and worship) and political ideology (a blueprint for a certain social order). Not knowing the difference is no excuse, and delusions of grandeur don’t make one the master of the universe.

In order to exercise their supremacy, the “believers” must first build a society based on the above blueprint, with an oppressive state to enforce their “right” to dominate others. This alone blows their religious cover and places their intentions into the realm of utopian political ideologues. Their inability to create a functioning civilization with a full set of the above rules has been a source of frustration, resentment, and violent outbursts throughout the centuries.

The latest attempts include the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and most recently the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) who, in spite of their “religious” name, are driven by a very earthly goal of forcing everyone, through mass murder and terror, to submit to their supremacy. In this, they enjoy a broad support of “true believers” worldwide, who flock to the Islamic State from all corners of the earth, hoping to get their piece of the pie in the utopian totalitarian theocracy they call the Caliphate.

In this and other scenarios, Sharia has always served as a blueprint for a brutal supremacist theocracy. Given that the White House has rejected the word “Islamism” because it might give Islam a bad name, why not actually help Islam save face and declare all past bad behavior to be the result of Sharia?

Once dealing with Sharia as a hostile political ideology becomes fair game, this problem can finally get the treatment of the Ebola epidemic that it deserves. Like the Ebola virus, Sharia is lethal and is prone to deadly outbreaks – as seen in New York, London, Madrid, and thousands of other places around the world, taking hundreds of thousands of lives.

Just like Ebola requires careful quarantine, so does Sharia. Think of the Boston Marathon bombing as a Sharia outbreak. Think of the Fort Hood shooting as a Sharia outbreak. Once the culprit is known and isolated, it will only be a matter of time before all the hot spots are identified, quarantined, and extinguished.

Once the United States rids itself of the Sharia virus, others will follow, leaving fewer and fewer host bodies for Sharia to incubate and destroy.

In case anyone would rush to judgment and label this modest proposal “Islamophobic,” consider that the official separation of Islam-the-religion from Sharia-the-totalitarian-ideology would benefit the proverbial peaceful and law-abiding Muslims in more ways than pandering to Islamic radicals ever could. With Sharia out of the way, Islam can finally have a chance to become a religion of peace in real life and not only in the speeches of double-speaking clerics and politicians.

The Democrats are known for their amazing skills to turn crises into opportunities. The ISIS crisis may not have been intentional, but here’s a real opportunity to not let it go to waste - without leaving the comfort of the Oval Office or a golf course as the case may be.

Let’s face it: a Republican president would never be able to do any of this effectively, lacking the support of the media and the cultural establishment. President Obama, on the other hand, is the darling of the media, academia, and the arts, which makes him uniquely positioned to employ these options and save the world from the threat of Islamic terrorism once and for all.

If Obama really meant what he said about considering all options, he should be using his phone and his pen right now.

Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic artist from the former USSR, is the author of Shakedown Socialism, of which David Horowitz said, “I hope everyone reads this book.” In 1994 he moved to the U.S. with the hope of living in a country ruled by reason and common sense, appreciative of its freedoms and prosperity. To his dismay, he discovered a nation deeply infected by the leftist disease of “progressivism” that was arresting true societal progress. Oleg is the creator of a satirical website ThePeoplesCube.com, which Rush Limbaugh described on his show as “a Stalinist version of The Onion.”President Obama’s White House statement on Aug. 28 was clear on two things: “ISIS must be defeated” and “we don’t have a strategy yet.”*