Hola, all! I’m Marta Hernandez, and we need to have a chat about terrorism.

Seems like every month we hear about swine-humping ISIS adherents launching attacks on innocent people – particularly in Europe. We don ribbons. We color our Facebook profiles with the appropriate backgrounds to commemorate the losses of innocent lives. We search out appropriate memes, extolling the virtues of our particular faith and condemning Islam as a violent cult.

That’s all well and good, I guess. We need to condemn these murderous acts for our own sanity, more than anything. We need to vent our outrage. We need – for our own emotional welfare and that of our allies – to offer our friendship and support to innocents and their families who have lost their lives and loved ones. It certainly won’t stop the ISIS-inspired and supported swine from launching more attacks. Indeed, it might actually encourage them to know that they’ve got our attention and that they’ve made an impact. They might be rubbing their grubby, butt-wiping hands together in glee, knowing they’ve stuck it to the infidels again.

There was another terrorist attack today in a Paris suburb that injured six people in what has become what seems like a relatively common occurrence in Western Europe. The BMW rammed into a group of soldiers leaving their barracks before speeding away. Two of the six troops were seriously injured.

If we look at a map of ISIS terrorist attacks between 2014 and 2015, we see that the majority of attacks happen close to where they reside: the Middle East and Africa. In 2016 and 2017, ISIS-related terrorist incidents appear to be on the rise in Western Europe. I counted 41 ISIS terrorist attacks on Western European targets between 24 May 2014 and 28 July 2017 – 42, if you count today’s attack in Paris. Most of them seem to be targeted at France, the UK, Germany, and Belgium. There have been a handful in all of North America in comparison during the same time period.

This interactive heat map shows the frequency of terrorist attacks worldwide (including, but not limited to ISIS) – also confirming the majority of terrorist attacks take place in the Middle East and Africa.

We’ve been lucky that compared to Europe, the attacks on U.S. soil seem to be relatively rare. But why?

Are we really that good at deterring terrorists? Is it our stringent VISA and visitor vetting requirements? Is our security just that good? What are we doing that the Europeans are not?

I have a couple of theories on this.

First of all, it’s not that we’re that good; it’s that we’re that lucky. We’ve got oceans on both the eastern and western sides of our country. Flights aren’t exactly cheap, and ISIS douche pickles aren’t exactly rich. They don’t have the resources to obtain false passports and plane tickets to fly over here and launch attacks on our people.

So the biggest advantage we have is our proximity – or lack thereof – to terrorist hotspots.

Terrorists, especially ones inspired, not directed, by ISIS, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, and other goat botherers, generally stick close to home, and we have relatively few of them here in the United States.

Europe has a bigger problem, because thousands of refugees are flooding their shores, and while the majority aren’t terrorists, it’s relatively easy for ISIS supporters to hide in hordes who are coming ashore. Additionally, Europe also has an unintegrated Muslim problem. While it’s true that many do integrate into European society and become productive members, the liberal left would have you believe that this is true for the majority of Muslims who enter Europe. When they don’t integrate the politically correct left seems to blame the Western society for being xenophobic, Islamophobic, brown people phobic *insert sniveling condemnation here* phobic, bigoted, and racist, rather than examining the real causes of high unemployment and dissatisfaction among Muslim immigrants in Europe.

No matter what the cause of disgruntled, impotent rage among European Muslims, they’re there. They’re pissed off. They’re susceptible to any propaganda that paints them as victims and gives them an excuse for their failure that doesn’t lay the blame squarely in their laps.

Enter ISIS and their fairly sophisticated propaganda. They inspire. They provide excuses for these malcontents’ failure to adapt and succeed. They give the disgruntled a scapegoat. (At the risk of Godwining myself out of the conversation, sounds fairly Hitlery, n’est-ce pas?)

So while a number of them could be hiding in the waves of refugees that crash on Europe’s shores, many either arrived as children like the leader of the group that launched the London Bridge attacks and became radicals later in life, or were born and radicalized in Europe like Khalid Masood who drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge.

Additionally, it’s the money. The Europeans and the Americans have gotten pretty good at tracking terrorist finances, believe it or not. It might not be popular among the ardent libertarians because of the privacy implications, but the agreement the United States has with the EU and with SWIFT – The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication that provides the network that enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions through the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) that identifies, tracks, and pursues terrorists and their networks has been pretty successful at ensuring that we know where the money is going and who is getting it. That means the terrorist wire transfers have to fly under the radar. If they’re getting any money to do their dastardly deeds, instead of just being inspired to commit acts of mass murder, it needs to be small amounts that won’t look suspicious and can avoid detection. Equipment, plane tickets, and fake passport costs can add up, so they generally tend to stay close to home.

So we have relatively few Muslims not willing to assimilate, while Europe has a ton more, and they’re breeding their own little jihadist tribes in their ghettos spurred by the ubiquitous existence of ISIS propaganda on the Internet. So while the Jihadist turnips blow themselves up and sacrifice themselves for Allah, the ISIS commanders proudly claim them as their own after the fact, while not spending a penny to resource or direct them – especially since European governments seem to be paying welfare benefits to radical jihadists, who are then using that money to engage in terrorism!

It’s a win-win for everyone.

Except the west.