A terrific column by Mark Steyn over the weekend at his website takes issue with the boilerplate statement that what happened in Chattanooga last week was “senseless violence”…

If you seriously think this is a senseless act of senselessly senseless violence, then you’re the one who’s senseless. This isn’t a harmless banality one can forgive in the stress of the moment. It’s part of the reason we’re losing.

And Steyn adds something else which is spot-on…

I’m afraid the makeshift memorials of flags and other patriotic memorabilia that have sprung up on the edge of the police tape depress the hell out of me. A no doubt sincere veneration for the military apparently can only express itself with a feeble passivity that is a large part of the problem. This isn’t a time for the bumper-sticker bromides of “We salute our heroes/Thank you for your service/We support our troops”. Among the dead are men who waged a bloody and hard-fought battle to retake Fallujah …only to come home and die unarmed in a crappy shopping mall at the hands of a halfwit fanatic whose family had been under the leisurely money-no-object scrutiny of the bloated security apparatus for years.

A Chinese-made teddy bear from Wal-Mart is not an appropriate reaction. Righteous anger is. And there’s not a lot of evidence of that. At that parking-lot memorial, the public seems to discern that such anger is no longer an approved sensibility – whereas a teary generalized sadness gets plenty of media coverage. This is the same media, by the way, that, after a couple of perfunctory questions about Chattanooga, asked Josh Earnest for more details about the “father-daughter weekend” President Obama is currently enjoying in New York. Golly, you’d almost get the impression they’re really not that sad at all.

Screw the cakes and balloons. We who did not know them cannot mourn them: That is for their friends and family. The nation’s duty is to avenge them – so that they did not die in vain.

He’s correct, in that those cheesy makeshift memorials at the sites of actrocities like the one Mohammed Youssuf Abdulazeez perpetrated last week aren’t the right answer. The right answer is to solve the problem.

The right answer is that if the jihadists are going to focus on sending fanatics to attack soft targets with rifles, we need to make all the targets hard. If they want to attack military installations, then let’s have the people at those installations armed to the teeth so that the first and only casualty of these attacks is the attacker.

And the right answer is to get rid of the problem in the first place. Stop taking in people who come from an alien, hostile and inferior culture which is bent on dominating ours, and start deporting the people we’ve taken who are abusing our hospitality.

When we take Somali refugees in, and their kids go to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab, then it’s time to send the whole family with them. Somali refugee kids who want to go back there to join Al-Shabaab aren’t assimilating to be Americans, and it’s clear they’re a waste of our good will.

When we take in Palestinians who got kicked out of Kuwait for supporting Saddam’s invasion, and their response to a maladjusted douche of a kid is to send him to Jordan to be radicalized as a Muslim, and nobody at his mosque can even imagine him doing something like this when it’s come out that he’s been drunk, drugged-out and unstable for years…it’s time to start going through the lot of these people, figure out who can be deported and send as many home as possible.

And every illegal we find who comes from such an alien and hostile culture ought to be shipped off immediately. They don’t belong here and as we’ve seen the risk of another Adbulazeez is too great.

And when we find mosques where the imam is preaching the jihad, it’s time to raid the mosque and shut it down. Your freedom of religion does NOT give you the right to plot violent overthrow of the U.S. government or the murder of American citizens.

The balloons and flags might make people feel good. They’re useless. What we need is hard-ass action to prove to these people that we mean business, and that if they can’t behave themselves while they’re here then we’re going to diminish their presence in this country.

Because despite the feel-good bullshit phrase our media and political elite apply to this – “senseless violence” – Steyn is correct. It isn’t senseless at all. They’re at war with us and they’re prosecuting that war with every asset they have.