Stop freaking out over the West's jihadi tourists

Their numbers are minuscule. And if anything, this trend shows the triumph of liberalism.

ISIS
(Image credit: (AP Photo/Raqqa Media Center))

ISIS is not just a nasty extremist group — it's a nasty extremist group with Western recruits. It even gave the starring role in the gruesome videotaped beheading of two American journalists to a British rapper.

The rise of ISIS is massively unsettling, and time will tell if it's a good thing that President Obama has finally figured out a "strategy" to deal with this group. But nothing about ISIS justifies the growing fears in the West that liberalism's lack of "transcendent" purpose is making it difficult to counter the allure of its Islamist ideological opponents.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.