What good are words against men who slaughter their own mothers?

Our government is too soft when it comes to confronting the greatest security threat the West is facing this century, great upheaval in western Europe and an existential crisis in the Middle East.

JAKARTA, INDONESIA - JANUARY 14: An Indonesian policeman stands guard in front of a blast site at the Indonesia capital Jakarta on January 14, 2016 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Reports of explosions and gunshots in the centre of the Indonesian capital, including outside the United Nations building and in the front of the Sarinah shopping mall, an area with many luxury hotels, embassies and offices. (Photo by Oscar Siagian/Getty Images)

After every terrorist attack, the only thing more sickening than the ever-rising count of the dead is the clockwork bleating of those who refuse to acknowledge why they died.

It is a dark talisman of our times that the so-called intelligentsia can turn apoplectic at a joke about Caitlyn Jenner yet be unmoved by a call to arms against a murderous horde slaughtering people across the world.

This week’s atrocity in Jakarta is the latest, but sadly not the last, in a string of attacks by ISIS and their sympathisers that have obliterated innocent lives from Istanbul to California, Paris, Ankara, Egypt, Beirut, Nigeria and, of course Sydney, not to mention their ongoing campaign of horror in Syria and Iraq.

Their predecessors in al Qaeda killed almost 3000 people on September 11, 2001, more than 200 in the Bali bombings the following year, and followed it with further mass killings in London, Madrid and Mumbai. Even they have denounced ISIS for being too extreme.

Yet the very same day as the Jakarta attack it was revealed by The Daily Telegraph that the Turnbull government had knocked back a request from the United States for more military assistance to fight this army of psychopaths.

What do we have to do, the terrorists must be thinking, to piss this guy off?

The Greens, of course, have welcomed the decision, an endorsement that should make any Liberal blue blood run cold. Labor, to its great credit, wants to know what the f**k is going on.

In truth it’s this: the US wants to escalate its involvement on the ground, because it knows that’s the only way of making sure you kill the terrorists and not the innocent.

Currently some three out of four bombing missions turn back with their payload unspent because the risk of civilian casualties is too high. ISIS knows this and so surrounds its operations with human shields. Thus most air strikes don’t work.

This policy is vital to avoiding the mistakes of the last Iraq war but it’s also obviously ineffective when it comes to wiping ISIS out.

Of course the US could storm Syria like Normandy if it wanted to. But in fact we are talking about specialist advisers and rangers working with the Iraqi army, regional powers and/or moderate Syrian rebels.

In other words, the US needs to act in concert with a broad international coalition to ensure the campaign is one of civilisation over barbarity and not just another bumbling invasion.

And naturally there is little political appetite in America, as here, for any more young lives lost abroad.

Moreover, the Obama administration was clearly just putting out the feelers when Australia said no. Any formal request for extra personnel would always be agreed to because the deal would already have been done before the formal request was made.

If the US is serious, then you might expect an announcement after Malcolm’s meeting with Barack next week.

What it does show, however, is a lily-white softness in our government when it comes to confronting the greatest security threat the West is facing this century, the greatest upheaval western Europe has faced since World War II and an existential crisis in the Middle East.

All indications are that 2016 will be even more plagued by terrorist attacks than last year’s high water mark. We can talk about peace and diplomacy all we want but it is a language that extremists simply do not speak.

Just last week there was a report of a young man in Syria whose mother had begged him to leave ISIS. He publicly executed her outside the post office where she worked.

Try negotiating with that.