"ISIS" did not attack in Manchester; a second-generation Muslim, son of immigrants, did.

The Islamic State may have inspired 22-year-old Salman Abedi, but ISIS in the Middle East did not murder 22 youngsters and injure dozens at a pop-tart performance. 

ISIS, no doubt, is pleased that Salman Abedi killed in Manchester.  The outfit is eager to continue providing inspiration, even training, to his kind.  But the ephemeral ISIS did not send Abedi and his ilk to kill Britons.

The Abedis, who fly the Libyan flag outside the family home, were invited into England.  Policymakers and power-brokers in the West have invited Muslim immigrants to live among us in the belief that, underneath the burqa, the abaya, and full-body swaddle, they are just like us.

Almost all these Muslim killers are legitimate immigrants.  Before the Manchester murderer came Knifeman Khalid Masood on Westminster Bridge (March 2017).  There were the immigrants who carved up Drummer Lee Rigby, in Woolwich, and the Muslim who gutted an American woman in central London, both in 2013.  It's hard to keep up.

This is how citizenship in the West has been rubbished – not by ISIS, but by your representatives, state officials who regard all of us impersonally and imperiously.  The same overlords squint at the great unwashed of England or Middle America from behind their parapets in Whitehall and Washington.  The same sorts despise us all for wanting neighborhoods that are safe, maybe even a tad monocultural.

While the Muslims who strike at our families live among us, they're not of us.

Look: language mediates behavior.  To properly respond to the vipers that elect to kill Americans, Europeans, and Englishmen, we need to closely describe them.

To be vested in linguistic accuracy is to be vested in the truth.  The closer language cleaves to reality, the greater the likelihood that correct, and corrective, action will follow.

Certainly, the term of choice must reflect not ideology, right or left, but reality.  For if we don't describe exactly who's killing us, we'll be unable to eject such people from our midst.

The more abstract the expert Idiocracy gets in defining what is murder by Muslim immigrant, the more removed will be its solutions – removed from solutions that are at once achievable and the legitimate purview of limited government.

You and I will be forced to pay for elaborate schemes that relate not at all to the problem at hand.  Think about George Bush's dictum of fighting them over there so they don't come here.  W failed to consider that thanks to longstanding liberal immigration policies, the snakes were hibernating among us.  Besides, bombing Syria or Iraq doesn't stop a Manchester.  To the contrary, it triggers it.

So don't be fooled.

ISIS and an abstract ideology called "radical Islamic terrorism" – a redundancy, if ever there was one, since Islam unreformed is radical – are not attacking us.  Men and women upon whom we've conferred the right to live among us are.

Berlin endured a Christmas market massacre in 2016.  There was slaughter in Nice, Paris, even in an ancient village in Normandy, where an elderly priest was decapitated on the altar by two young jackals.  Orlando; San Bernardino; Boston; and Chattanooga, Tennessee (where four Marines were executed in 2015) – the carnage, ongoing, is too great to catalog.  It emanates not from ISIS in the Levant or in the abstract, but from flesh-and-blood Muslims living right here, in America, in England, and on the Continent.   

Also sorely missed in the discussion is that in the U.S., Great Britain, and Western Europe, state and civil society acculturates immigrants into a militant identity politics.  Essentially, newcomers are taught to hate their hosts.  Nations whose institutions promote cultural relativism and hate of the dominant culture have no business importing the sort of immigrant who'll be quick to act on an ideology of hate – be it the self-hate of the host or the hate in jihad.

Of course, these dormant murderers – Muslim Americans, Canadians, Europeans, or Englishmen – did not act alone.

Behind almost every murder are state central planners: policymakers, immigration authorities, immigration attorneys, local networks of Islamic organizations, activists, media agitating for more Muslim immigration, an FBI erecting protective barriers around bad actors – civil liberties, they call it – and a command-and-control judiciary that has decided that the American Bill of Rights belongs to the world and was written to enrich immigration lawyers and their clientele the world over.

If the truth is that the threat we face is not in the Middle East, but here at home, and that it's more often than not an invited and legal threat – the solution presents itself.

Ilana Mercer is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 2016) and Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011).  Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Gab.  Check out Ilana's YouTube channel.