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Commentary: Brussels a reminder of the defining struggle of this generation

The terrorist attacks in Brussels, like the attacks last fall in Paris, have captured our attention in a way reminiscent of the days immediately after 9/11. Fifteen years later, there are still fundamental questions about the nature of the challenge that have yet to be answered.

People observe a minute of silence at the Place de la Bourse in Brussels Thursday.
People observe a minute of silence at the Place de la Bourse in Brussels Thursday.Read moreAP Photo/Peter Dejong

The terrorist attacks in Brussels, like the attacks last fall in Paris, have captured our attention in a way reminiscent of the days immediately after 9/11. Fifteen years later, there are still fundamental questions about the nature of the challenge that have yet to be answered.

Make no mistake about it. We are at war.

This is a world war - not in the sense of World Wars I and II, in which nation-states with great armies fought one another on battlefields, but a world war in the sense that it affects all nations, all peoples. The entire globe is the battlefield: towns in Syria and Iraq, a concert hall in Paris, a luxury hotel in Mali, a synagogue in Copenhagen, a community center in California.

No place on Earth is off limits.

Who exactly are we fighting?

The safe answer is ISIS, the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Its atrocities over the last two years have captured worldwide attention and shocked the civilized world. Its victories in parts of Syria and Iraq have given it land and financial resources.

Yet ISIS has only existed for a few years. This war has been raging far longer than that.

The Bush administration's preferred term was the war on terror. But terror is a tactic employed by our enemy, not the enemy itself.

President Obama labels our enemy "extremism" and hosted a global conference at the White House to combat it. But this strikes many as insufficient to explain the exact nature of the threat.

Some, of course, argue that we are at war with Islam. Yet we know that the vast majority of Muslims worldwide are in no way connected to terrorism. Indeed, no group is responsible for murdering more Muslims than ISIS.

We are at war with militant Islamism: the ideology that states that it is legitimate, indeed required, to murder those who do not practice a most violent, extreme version of Islam.

Those who advance this ideology believe all others are inferior to them. They are supremacists, just as the Nazis were racial supremacists. This is why they make no distinction between soldiers and civilians. In their eyes, all who are not with them are unworthy. This ideology unites al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Nusra, ISIS, and dozens of other groups. It is not the religion. It is the ideology.

How exactly do we wage war against these fanatics? There must be a military component, especially in Iraq and Syria. There must also be an intelligence component, especially in those areas of Europe known to be hotbeds of extremism.

But we cannot stop there. We must also actively fight the ideology, especially online.

It is ironic that those fighting to drive civilization back to the seventh century are particularly skilled at using 21st-century technology. In the large battlefield of social media, we simply must do better. It still amazes me that we, the country that gave the world the Internet and Hollywood, are losing the propaganda battle.

Unfortunately, the policies gaining popularity at the moment are exactly the wrong ones to wage this war. First, after Paris, the majority in Congress shifted the focus to refugees from Syria. This is shortsighted and achieves nothing. We will not defeat ISIS by targeting the victims of ISIS.

Second, leading GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed banning all Muslims from the United States. This is simply un-American. The overwhelming majority of Americans who practice Islam love this country. They are just as American as I am. But aside from the proposal's immorality, it would do precisely nothing to help us win. It plays right into the hands of those militant Islamists who advance the false narrative that we are at war with Islam.

The second half of the 20th century was dominated by the ideological struggle between the democratic West, led by the United States, and the communist East, led by the Soviet Union. In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy called our fight for freedom and against communism "our long twilight struggle."

The fight against militant Islamism is this generation's long twilight struggle. It will not be won in a day, a month, or a year. But this is a war we must fight and win.

U.S. Rep. Brendan F. Boyle (D., Pa.) is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. @RepBrendanBoyle