Tag Archive for: Syria

Turkey Uses the Islamic State as Excuse to Attack Kurds

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Erdogan has been notably reluctant to attack the Islamic State, and when he finally does, he attacks the Kurds. Clearly he hopes that the Islamic State will take care of some of his enemies for him, and then Turkey can step in and reap the dividends.

“Turkey Uses ISIS as Excuse to Attack Kurds,” by Uzay Bulut, Gatestone Institute, July 26, 2015:

Turkey’s government seems to be waging a new war against the Kurds, now struggling to get an internationally recognized political status in Syrian Kurdistan.

On July 24, Turkish media sources reported that Turkish jet fighters bombed Kurdish PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) bases in Qandil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.

Turkey is evidently unsettled by the rapprochement the PKK seems to be establishing with the U.S. and Europe. Possibly alarmed by the PKK’s victories against ISIS, as well as its strengthening international standing, Ankara, in addition to targeting ISIS positions in Syria, has been bombing the PKK positions in the Qandil mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the PKK headquarters are located.

There is no ISIS in Qandil.

As expected, many Turkish media outlets were more enthusiastic about the Turkish air force’s bombing the Kurdish militia than about bombing ISIS. “The camps of the PKK,” they excitedly reported, “have been covered with fire.”

It appears as if Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is using ISIS as a pretext to attack the PKK. Ankara just announced that its air base at Incirlik will soon be open to coalition forces, presumably to fight ISIS, but the moment Turkey started bombing, it targeted Kurdish positions. Those attacks not only open a new era of death and destruction, but also bring an end to all possibilities of resolving Turkey’s Kurdish issue non-violently.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that

“a second wave operation against Daesh [ISIS] in Syria was started. Just after that, a very comprehensive operation was carried out against the camps of the terrorist organization PKK in northern Iraq. I am glad that the targets were hit with great success. We have given instructions to start a third wave operation in Syria and a second wave operation in Iraq.”

The “great success” of the Turkish military has brought much damage and injury to even Kurdish civilians — including children. The Kurdish newspaper Rudaw reportedthat two Kurdish villagers in Duhok’s Berwari region were carried to hospital in the aftermath of a Turkish artillery bombardment in the Amediye region. One of the victims was 12 years old. The second victim lost a leg in an airstrike. Four members of the PKK were killed and several others were injured.

Shortly after military operations against the PKK started, access to the websites of pro-Kurdish newspapers and news agencies was denied “by decree of court.” These websites — including Fırat News Agency (ANF), Dicle News Agency (DIHA), Hawar News Agency (ANHA), Ozgur Gundem newspaper, Yuksekova News, Rudaw and BasNews — are still blocked in Turkey.

ISIS, meanwhile, has not so far made any statement regarding Turkey’s so-called bombings of ISIS in any of its media outlets.

Had Turkish military attacked the PKK alone, and not in addition to attacking ISIS, it would probably have received widespread international condemnation. So to add “legitimacy” to its attacks against the Kurdish PKK — whose affiliate Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria and its armed wing, the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) have been resisting ISIS and other Islamist terrorist groups since 2013 — Turkey declared that it will also attack ISIS. This would give it cover for its attacks against Kurdish fighters.

In 2014, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the plan he wanted to carry out in Syria and Iraq: “The problem in Syria should be taken into account. Iraq too should be considered similarly. Moreover, there needs to be a solution that will also deal with the Syrian wing [PYD] of the separatist terrorist organization [PKK].”

The AKP government, dissatisfied with the results of last month’s parliamentary elections, also seems to want to hold new elections, to push the mainly Kurdish HDP Party below the required 10% threshold, and thus force them out of parliament. Perhaps the government thinks that bombing the PKK will generate Turkish nationalist enthusiasm that will work in the AKP’s favor to help it regain a majority in early elections.

Apparently, Turkey does not need Kurdish deputies in its parliament. Apparently, the state prefers to slaughter or arrest the Kurds — as it has done for decades. Why hold talks and reach a democratic resolution when you have the power to murder people wholesale?[1]

Sadly, Turkey has preferred not to form a “Turkish-Kurdish alliance” to destroy ISIS. First, Turkey has opened its borders to ISIS, enabling the growth of the terrorist group. And now, at the first opportunity, it is bombing the Kurds again. According to this strategy, “peace” will be possible only when Kurds submit to Turkish supremacism and abandon their goal of being an equal nation.

In the meantime, Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkish minister of foreign affairs, said that the Incirlik air base in Turkey has not yet been opened for use by the U.S. and other coalition forces, but that it will be opened in the upcoming period.

Kurdish forces, therefore, are the only forces that are truly resisting the Islamic State.

They have been repressed by Baghdad and murdered by Turkey and Iran.

If this is how the states that rule over Kurds treat them, why is there even any question as to whether the Kurds should have their own self-government?

As a result of the ISIS attacks in the region, the Kurdish PKK — as well as its Syrian Kurdish affiliate, Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) — have emerged as the America’s most effective battlefield partners against ISIS. Ever since ISIS became a major force in Syria, the U.S. has apparently relied heavily on YPG to stop ISIS from advancing. According to Henri Barkey, a former State Department specialist on Turkey, “The U.S. has become the YPG’s air force and the YPG has become the U.S.’s ground force in Syria.”

[ … ]

Attacks on the Kurds were already under way last week. On July 20, a bomb attack in the Kurdish town of Suruc (Pirsus) in Turkey killed 32 people during a meeting of young humanitarian activists, who were discussing the reconstruction of the neighboring Kurdish town of Kobane.

The scene of the suicide bombing in Suruc, Turkey. An ISIS suicide bomber murdered 32 people and wounded more than 100 others in a July 20 attack on Kurdish humanitarian activists. (Image source: VOA video screenshot)

The blast took place while the activists were making a statement to the press in the garden of a cultural center. At least 100 others, mostly university students, were wounded. (Graphic video of the explosion)

The suicide bomber was identified through DNA testing, according to reports in the Turkish news media. Seyh Abdurrahman Alagoz was reportedly a 20-year-old Turkish university student, recently returned from Syria, and believed to have had ties to ISIS.

Alagoz targeted a meeting 300 secular activists, members of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations (SGDF), who gathered at a cultural center in the province of Urfa, opposite the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syrian Kurdistan. As part of an effort to rebuild Kobane, they were preparing to provide aid, give toys to the children there and build a hospital, school, nursery, children’s park, library and a memorial forest for those who had lost their lives in Kobane.

“Work on the building of hospitals and schools needs to be done,” Oguz Yuzgec, the co-president of the federation, said before the explosion. “One of the things we will do is to build a children’s park in Kobane. We will name it after Emre Aslan, who died fighting in Kobane. We are collecting toys. We will participate in the construction of the nursery that the canton of Kobane is planning to build. We have the responsibility of helping the nursery function. We need everybody who knows how to draw and can teach children.”

Mazlum Demirtas, a survivor of the attack, said: “The main one responsible for this incident is the state of Turkey, the AKP fascism, the AKP dictatorship. … It attacked us with its gunmen and gangs. Since yesterday, parents have been collecting the dismembered body parts of their children. They are trying to identify the dismembered bodies. This is called fascism, inhumanity and barbarity.”

Pinar Gayip, another survivor of the attack, said in a telephone interview on the pro-government Haberturk TV that, “Instead of helping the wounded, the murderer-police of the murderer-AKP threw tear gas at the vehicles with which we carried the wounded.” She was taken off the air.

All across Turkish Kurdistan, there were protests condemning the massacre and the government’s alleged involvement in it. Police in Istanbul used plastic bullets and water cannons against people who gathered to remember those murdered in Suruc.

The Turkish authorities briefly blocked access to Twitter last Wednesday to prevent the people from viewing photos of the bombing in Suruc. Officials admitted that Turkey had asked Twitter to remove 107 URLs (web addresses) with images related to the bombing; before the ban, Twitter had already removed 50.

Selahattin Demirtas, the co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Party (HDP), said that state surveillance activities were intensive in Suruc, and that the intelligence service was recording the identity of everyone traveling to and from Suruc.

As Demirtas’s own convoy had recently not been permitted to enter Suruc, heemphasized the extent of state surveillance in the town, and said that nobody could argue that someone could have managed to infiltrate the crowd and carry out the suicide attack without state support.

“Today, we have witnessed in Suruc yet again what an army of barbarity and rape, an army that has lost human dignity, can do,” Demirtas said. “Those who have been silent in the face of ISIS, who have not dared even raise their voice to it, as well as the officials in Ankara who threaten even the HDP every day but caress the head of ISIS, are the accomplices of this barbarity.”

In the meantime, Mehmet Gormez, the head of the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), announced on its Twitter account that the perpetrators of the Suruc attack do not have religion.

However, three days before the massacre in Suruc, about 100 Islamists — alleged to be ISIS sympathizers — had performed mass Islamic Eid prayers in Istanbul. They demanded Islamic sharia law instead of democracy. ISIS sympathizers had performed the same Eid prayers at the same place the year before, as well.

Over the border in Syrian Kurdistan, shortly after the blast in Suruc, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at a checkpoint in Kobane. Two Kurdish fighters were killed in the explosion, according to Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Last month, a deadly blast hit the Kurdish province of Diyarbakir in Turkey, during an election rally of the pro-Kurdish HDP that was attended by tens of thousands of people. Just before the HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtas was going to speak, two bombsexploded at different places. Four people were killed, and more than 100 people are estimated to have been wounded. One of the wounded, Lisa Calan, 28, a Kurdish art director from Diyarbakir, lost both legs in the explosion.

As the wounded were being carried to hospitals, police used tear gas against people trying to run from the area in panic

The bomber was reported to be a member of ISIS.

[ … ]

In Turkey, millions of indigenous Kurds are continually terrorized and murdered, while ISIS terrorists can freely travel and use official border crossings to go to Syria and return to Turkey; they are even treated at Turkish hospitals. Emrah Cakan, for instance, a Turkish-born ISIS commander wounded in Syria, got medical treatment at the university hospital in Turkey’s Denizli province in March.

The Denizli governor’s office issued a written statement on 5 March:

“The treatment of Emrah C. at the Denizli hospital was started upon his own application. The procedural acts concerning his injury were conducted by our border city during his entry to our country and they still continue. And his treatment procedures continue as a part of his right to benefit from health services just like all our other citizens have.”

The “compassion” and hospitality that many Turkish institutions have for ISIS members is not even hidden. The silence of the West is mystifying and disappointing.

The U.S. government cooperates with oppressive regimes — including the terrorist regime of Iran, under which Kurds are forced to live — to the detriment of the Kurds, to the detriment other persecuted peoples, and to the detriment of the future of the West.

Many Middle Eastern regimes are ruled by Islamist, often genocidal governments — so there is not much to expect from them in terms of human rights and liberties.

The Kurds need real support, real arms and real recognition. Otherwise, there does not seem to be much difference between the dictatorial, genocidal Middle Eastern regimes and the West, which used to represent democracy and freedom.

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Grimly, History Repeats Itself

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In a recent story by BBC reporter Jane Corbin, she describes the plight of Christians living in Muslim nations of the Middle East.  After a visit to an ancient monastery in Iraq, she writes,

“As I climbed the steep mountain path above the plain of Nineveh, Iraq, the sound of monks chanting and the smell of incense drifted out of the 4th Century monastery of St. Matthew.  Once, 7,000 monks worshipped here when Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Almost the whole population was Christian then.  Their numbers have dwindled and now there are only six monks – and no pilgrims dare to visit.”

Describing the rise of ISIS, she writes, “They swept across the plain of Nineveh last year, forcing tens of thousands of Christians to flee from Mosul, Iraq’s second city…  A million people, two-thirds of Iraq’s Christians, fled in the decade following the fall of Saddam.  The same story is being repeated in country after country across the Middle East where the Arab Spring unleashed forces that turned against Christians and the authoritarian leaders who once protected them.”

In a radio interview on April 12, 2015, Samy Gemayel, a Phalangist Party member of the Lebanese Parliament, predicted that, “If the U.S. and international community do not intervene, Christians may be driven out of the Middle Eastern Arab countries within two years.”  Other experts predict that, in the absence of western intervention, Christian churches will be razed to the ground and the faithful either killed by radical Islamists or driven from their homes.

After centuries of brutal conquest, the Ottoman Turk empire extended across Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.  Their most significant minority, the Armenian Christians, were treated like second class citizens, denied such basic protections as property rights and personal security.  As non-Muslims, they were forced to pay discriminatory taxes and denied participation in the affairs of government.

However, by 1914, having lost virtually all of their territories in Europe and Africa, the Ottoman Turks experienced enormous internal pressures, both political and economic.  And when the Armenian minority pressed demands for representation and participation in government, ethnic tensions were intensified.  Demands by Armenian political leaders for administrative reforms, especially in provinces where Armenians represented a clear majority, invited further repression.

The Armenians were not unaware of the dangers represented by challenging the authority of their Muslim rulers.  For example, a series of massacres carried out during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II between the years 1894-96 were still fresh in their minds.  Those massacres cost the lives of as many as three hundred thousand Armenians.

Just over 100 years ago the Armenian Christian population of the Ottoman Empire numbered some two million people.  However, beginning on April 15, 1915, the Turks accelerated their campaign to cleanse their country of their Armenian minority, ordering the entire Armenian population deported.  Tens of thousands… men, women, and children… were forced to walk hundreds of miles toward the Syrian frontier.

The Turks made no arrangements for food and water, and while a great many of all ages died of starvation or dehydration, or from attacks by criminal Muslim bands, physical exhaustion took the lives of many of the elderly and the infirm.  Straggling south under the scorching desert sun, the denial of food and water was intended only to hasten the death of the Armenians.  By 1918, some one million Armenians had been systematically murdered, and by 1923 virtually the entire Armenian Christian population had disappeared from Turkey.

It is estimated that, in the eight year period between 1915 and 1923, as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.  Those Armenians who survived the genocide owed their lives to the humanitarian efforts of the United States.  Under a plan devised by Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople, the U.S. Congress established a relief program called “Near East Relief,” and tens of thousands of Armenian lives were saved.

But now, exactly a century later, we find that history is repeating itself, but on a much broader and more brutal scale.  What happened to the Armenian Christians in the early 20th century is now happening to Christians all across Africa and the Middle East in the early 21st century.  And while western political leaders, most notably Barack Obama, the reluctant “leader” of the free world, stand transfixed in fear, not knowing what to do or how to respond, American and European Christians are attacked and murdered in the streets of their own cities.

The March 24, 2015 edition of Globe Newswire asks,

“Who is courageous enough to brave the possibility of being beheaded, burned alive, or crucified to bring the world the voices of those Christians whom Muslim extremists have been hunting off the face of the Earth?”  We are, after all, at war with a worldwide religious sect that thinks nothing of kidnapping hundreds of young girls at a time and selling them into slavery, of raping and crucifying children, of beheading their captives in order to strike terror into the hearts of non-Muslims, of setting caged captives on fire in a public square, of drowning captives by placing them in a cage and submerging them in tanks of water, or of gathering up all the Christians from among hundreds of refugees and throwing them overboard in mid-ocean as they attempt to escape the poverty and the Muslim-inspired brutality of their homelands.

So who is to stand up to such barbarism… whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or here at home?  What do you do when all those guys dressed in black, wielding machetes and flying a black flag, come after you with guns blazing, offering to slice off your head at the shoulders and to rape your wife and your children?

Some of the 450 new troops that Obama is sending to Iraq to face 30,000 or 40,000 ISIS butchers will be embedded with forward units of the Iraqi military as advisors and air controllers.  If those U.S. troops begin to take casualties, especially fatalities, how will Obama explain that?  But worse, if radical Islamists step up their attacks on our own soil, how will Obama react to that?

On February 26, 1993, radical Islamists detonated a truck packed with explosives under the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, killing six and injuring 1,042 others.  Seven Islamic terrorists, under the leadership of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), were tracked down, captured, and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.  KSM now resides in a cell at Guantanamo Bay while Barack Obama searches for a politically expedient way to free him.

Under “enhanced” interrogation, KSM admitted to masterminding both attacks on the New York World Trade Center, as well as the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  In that attack, carried out by nineteen radical Islamists, nearly 3,000 people were murdered.

Since the second World Trade Center attack, radical Islamists have staged some 73 separate attacks on U.S. soil in which 93 people have been killed and 333 seriously wounded.  The last such attack occurred on July 16, 2015, when 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, born in Kuwait, opened fire on an armed forces recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before driving seven miles to a naval reserve center where he was shot to death by police.  Five unarmed American servicemen, four Marines and a Sailor, were killed in the surprise attack.

In a July 17 article in FrontPageMag, titled “Terror Immigration to America Must Stop,” writer Daniel Greenfield writes that, “As the government began filling it with immigrants from terror zones, Tennessee, the Volunteer State, fought back because it hadn’t volunteered for this.  In 2008, it pulled out of the Federal refugee resettlement program, but the resettlement continued.”  Clearly, when Democrats are determined to swell the ranks of reliable Democratic voters, they are not easily dissuaded.

Greenfield tells us that three days before the Chattanooga terror attack, Muslims in Chattanooga protested in support of Islamberg, an exclusively Muslim New York community established by Mubarak Ali Gilani, who has said, ‘We are fighting to destroy the enemy.  We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.’  These are the people that Barack Obama is importing to live next door to you and me.

Greenfield explains that, “Every time the citizens of Tennessee attempted to stand up to terror immigration and the Murfreesboro Mega-Mosque , they were shouted down, smeared and lied about by the media.  A day from now, the media will have shifted the focus of the story from the murdered Marines to local Muslims whining about the backlash…”

Greenfield warns that it is not just the people who send checks to terrorist groups who deserve to be called terrorist supporters.  Those who support the importation of terrorists into this country, including Barack Obama and others in his administration, are the biggest terrorist supporters because without them most of the attacks we have suffered would not have been possible.

One wonders what would happen if fundamentalist Christians began attacking and killing Muslims in the same numbers and with the same frequency as Muslim fundamentalists attack and kill Christians, at home and abroad.  Would liberals, Democrats, and the mainstream media insist that we import more radicalized Christians?  Probably not.  As Greenfield says, “The war keeps coming home because we have filled our home with the enemy.  It’s time we clean house.”  But, short of draconian “house-cleaning” measures, we must ask ourselves this question: if there is no Morgenthau plan when the world’s non-Muslim population faces almost certain extinction, who will be there to save us?  Who will we look to?

Islamic State biggest threat to U.S. today

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A rare true statement from the Secretary of State. And of course the threat of the Islamic State is increased by the fact that Kerry and his cohorts refuse to acknowledge the ideology, beliefs, motives and goals of the Islamic State, and instead pretend that they are all other than what they really are. This denial will only lead to disaster.

“John Kerry: Daesh biggest threat to US, not Russia,” Middle East Monitor, July 11, 2015 (thanks to Bradamante):

The top U.S. diplomat doesn’t agree that Russia poses the greatest threat to the U.S., a State Department spokesman said Friday.

“Certainly, we have disagreements with Russia and its activities along or within the region, but we don’t view it as an existential threat,” said Mark Toner.

“Secretary [John Kerry] doesn’t agree with the assessment that Russia is an existential threat to the United States, nor China, quite frankly.”

Toner’s comments were in response remarks by Joseph Dunford, nominee to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said during his confirmation hearings that Russia presents the greatest threat to U.S. national security.

“What the secretary does consider an existential threat is the rapid growth of extremist groups like Daesh, particularly in ungoverned spaces,” Toner said.

The analysis of Russia comes amid one of the worst periods in Russian-U.S. relations since the Cold War concluded in 1991, prompted in large part by Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Daesh and al Qaeda’s “ability to attract foreign fighters” present “real and tangible threats” to the U.S., Toner said….

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Pentagon: Kurds “Reliable and Effective” Partners in War Against Islamic State

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Monday, July 6, 2015 was a red letter day in Washington with Pentagon officials acknowledging the critical role of Kurdish YPG and Peshmerga forces successfully fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. President Obama appeared at the Pentagon to give an update on the campaign to “degrade and destroy the Islamic state”.  It wasn’t a great score card since his declaration made on national television on September 10, 2014. He suggested that winning the war was going to a “generational conflict’.  “This will not be quick. This is a long-term campaign. (ISIS) is opportunistic and it is nimble,” Obama said. As usual he reiterated that the ISIS campaign was “not a war against Islam”.  This despite that ISIS  practices pure Salafist Islam that has attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters from across the Muslim ummah. The President still hasn’t addressed a coherent strategy except to commit minimal numbers of  U.S. trainers to develop combat cadres in both Iraq and Syria and conduct air assaults against ISIS targets. During his remarks he pointed to more than 5,000 air strikes in Iraq, Syria and North Africa equivalent to just three days of  air operations during the Gulf Wars.

According to CNN, President Obama suggested that the ‘coalition’ was going after “the heart” of the Islamic State. He exhorted Congress to confirm the replacement head of the Treasury Department, Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Adam Szubin.  He suggested that U.S. Trained forces had some successes on the ground in both Iraq and Syria backed up by air support, without naming them.   They are the Kurdish YPG (Popular Resistance Forces) in Syria and the Peshmerga in Iraq.  In our July New English Review (NER) Article, “Empowering Kurdistan”, those front line Kurdish forces have been the only forces capable of rolling back ISIS forces.  Obama and his national security staff had met with President Barzani  and aides of the Kurdish Regional Government in early May 2015 during the latter’s meetings in Washington seeking quality weapons and support  in the war against ISIS. We noted in our NER article that both KRG and Syrian Kurdish leaders had met separately with Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) in the House and Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman John McCain (R-AZ).  That resulted in amendments to the National Defense Appropriate Act authorizing military assistance for Kurdish fighting units in both Syria and Iraq.

Watch this C-Span video of President Obama’s Pentagon Conference on the ISIS War, July 6, 2015:

Secretary Ashton Carter and French Defese Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian Pentaon, July 6, 2019 Source Carolyn Kaster AP

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, The Pentagon, July 6, 2015. Source: Carolyn Kaster/AP.

A few hours before President Obama and military leaders briefings on the War against ISIS, there was another Pentagon meeting with a more positive message. This one featured  Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter and French Defense Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian to specifically discuss military aid for the Kurds.  McClatchey had a definitive report on that more substantive meeting recognizing the Kurds as “reliable and effective allies” in the war against ISIS, “Kurdish militia proving to be reliable partner against Islamic State in Syria.”   The McClatchey report noted:

In comments Monday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter acknowledged that Kurdish fighters from the YPG militia are identifying bombing targets for U.S.-led airstrikes. He referred to the militia as “capable,” hailed its “effective action,” and said because of the Kurds’ actions, U.S. forces had been able to “support them tactically.”

It was the first public description by a senior Obama administration official detailing the cooperation that has been unfolding for months between the United States and the militia, which has drawn the ire of key NATO ally Turkey.

The militia’s success is one of the reasons the United States is intensifying its bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, Carter said.

“That’s what we were doing over the weekend north of Raqqa, which is conducting airstrikes that limit ISIL’s freedom of movement and ability to counter those capable Kurdish forces,” Carter said, referring to the Islamic State by a common acronym.

Carter’s singling out of the YPG, or the People’s Protection Units, comes after months in which U.S. officials have said they were putting off a more concerted campaign in Syria in favor of pressing against the Islamic State in Iraq because the U.S. lacked a capable ground partner in Syria. As long ago as October, then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby was blunt about why U.S. activities there were lagging: “We don’t have a willing, capable, effective partner on the ground inside Syria. It’s just a fact.”

Secretary Carter went on to commend the YPG, ironically an offshoot of the Turkish Kurdish resistance PKK, still listed as a terrorist organization. The YPG successes have unnerved Islamist Turkish President Erdogan that he has suggested invading Syria to establish a 100 x 30 mile buffer zone to forestall further Kurdish advances to the west of Kobani on the Turkish frontier at Suruc.  Turkish military leaders are less supportive of that incursion.  Moreover, Erdogan’s agenda may have been effectively eclipsed despite an agreement to form a working coalition with the Turkish National Party, HNP. The latter was one of three minority parties, including the Kemalist CHP and the upstart Kurdish HDP that won a plurality of seats in the Ankara Parliamentary elections of June 7, 2015.

Carter went to site the YPG contributions in Syria:

Backed by U.S. air power, he said, YPG forces have advanced in the past weeks to within 18 miles of Raqqa, the main stronghold of the Islamic State in Syria.

“That’s the manner in which effective and lasting defeat of ISIL will occur, when there are effective local forces on the ground that we can support and enable so that they can take territory, hold territory and make sure that good governance comes in behind it,” Carter said.

How far the YPG will push its offensive is uncertain. Raqqa is not traditionally a Kurdish area, and Kurdish forces, which are said to number an estimated 16,000 troops, are not expected to try to take the city alone.

But the YPG offers a much more robust anti-Islamic State force inside Syria than does the training program the United States has undertaken: so far, only about 190 so-called moderate rebels have been enlisted in the program, which is intended to train 5,000 anti-Islamic State fighters a year.

The United States last month also expanded its airstrikes to northern Aleppo, another key northern Syria city about 100 miles west of Raqqa, putting the Islamic State on notice that a new drive to remove them from what is called the Marea front could be in the offing.

[…]

Carter made it clear that U.S. and allied warplanes are increasingly depending on the Kurdish forces as part of the Pentagon’s broader campaign to defeat the Islamic State.

“We are doing more in Syria from the air,” Carter said. “I think you saw some of that in recent days. And the opportunity to do that effectively is provided in the case of the last few days by the effective action on the ground of Kurdish forces, which gives us the opportunity to support them tactically.”

What has not been addressed publicly is the delivery of quality military weapons and training of YPG and Peshmerga forces who have fought with Soviet era weaponry against U.Sl arms and equipment obtained by ISIS from fleeing Iraqi national forces routed from Mosul in June 2014 and Ramadi in late May 2015. That may soon be coming given the presence of French Defense Minister Le Drian.  You may recall Secretary Carter upon learning of the fall of Ramadi accused Iraqi national forces of having” no will to fight”.  The Kurds exemplify military valor and have a proven record.

Secretary Carter should move expeditiously to release weapons and equipment from the US War Reserve Stock pre-positioned in Israel to the YPG, KURDNAS forces in Syria and Peshmerga in Iraq. Moreover, Gen. James Allen who heads the U.S.-led coalition force should ramp up aerial sorties beyond the paltry 40 sorties used to provide close air support to the YPG this past weekend. President Obama, unfortunately, has yet to recognize the pure Salafist form of Islam that is embodied in the barbaric violence perpetrated by ISIS on women, children, ancient religious minorities and Syrian and Iraqi military prisoners. Yes, Mr. President this is a war against Salafist Islam that the secular Muslim Kurds recognize must be destroyed.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of a female Kurdish fighter known as ‘Rehana’ (Image from Twitter user / @PawanDurani).

Obama: “Ideologies are not defeated with guns”

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1. Yes, they are. Cf. National Socialism.

2. The United States is not trying to defeat the Islamic State, or the global jihad in general, with “a more attractive and more compelling vision.” Instead, we supervised the installations of constitutions that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Imposing Sharia is the goal of all jihad groups, including the Islamic State. The United States has never stood in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else, for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, equality of rights for women, etc. — all of which are denied in Sharia. In other words, we didn’t counter their ideas with a more attractive and compelling vision. We didn’t counter them at all, and still aren’t doing so, because to do so would be considered “Islamophobic.”

And how is he going to counter their ideology when he won’t even acknowledge what it is?

3. “Our efforts to counter violent extremism must not target any one community because of their faith or background.” If he is referring to attacks on innocent Muslims, of course, no innocent Muslims should suffer any harm or injustice. He seems to be saying more than that. The idea that it is wrong to fight Islamic jihad by paying attention to Muslim communities more than Baptist or Jewish or Hindu or Amish communities is absurd. Islamic jihad is committed by Muslims. Obama won’t even call it Islamic jihad or admit that it is a specifically Muslim phenomenon, and insofar as he diverts any resources to tracking “right-wing extremism” on the basis of bogus studies, he makes us all less safe.

“Obama’s War Speech: ‘Ideologies Are Not Defeated With Guns,’” by Charlie Spiering, Breitbart, July 6, 2015:

At the Pentagon, President Obama delivered an update on his war against Islamic State terrorism, saying that the operation would take time to defeat the terrorist organization.

“This will not be quick, this is a long-term campaign,” he asserted, describing ISIS as “nimble” and infiltrated with civilians across the Middle East.

Obama did not announce any major shifts in his strategy, but reminded reporters that the fight was “not simply a military effort.”

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision,” he said.

Obama warned Americans of the increasing threat of individual acts of terror by lone wolf terrorists, but warned against targeting the region of Islam.

“Our efforts to counter violent extremism must not target any one community because of their faith or background – including patriotic Muslim Americans who are keeping our country safe,” he said.

But he admitted that ISIL was targeting Muslims.

“We also have to acknowledge that ISIL has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world including here in the United States and they are targeting Muslim communities around the world,” he said.

When asked by reporters if he was considering the use of American ground troops to defeat ISIS, he insisted that it was not under consideration.

“If we try to do everything ourselves all across the Middle East, all across North Africa, we’ll be playing ‘Whack-a-mole’ and there will be a whole lot of unintended consequences that ultimately will make us less secure,” he said.

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The Ideological Gutting of American Foreign Policy

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It was clear on the morning of September 11, 2001, that the United States was at war with Islamic radicals, and while there may have been differences of opinion regarding strategy, there was no denying the need to defeat doctrinal terrorism.  But as the U.S. became mired in foreign wars, critics questioned whether its actions were achieving the goal, and ultimately whether the goal was even justified.  Voices on the left falsely claimed that Arab-Muslim extremism was an understandable response to western chauvinism, and instead of condemning terrorists for their actions, they started blaming the victims for allegedly insulting Islam.

We saw it with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, when progressive pundits blamed free expression for inciting violence instead of the ideology that sanctified the killing of “infidels,” “heretics” and “blasphemers.”  Such attitudes arise from a perverse political correctness that elevates radical sensitivities over western cultural values.  But how can secular apologists defer to a doctrine that repudiates liberal democratic traditions?  How can they dignify claims of blasphemy against those who criticize beliefs they don’t consider sacred?

These questions were discussed at a program in Massachusetts entitled, “Freedom Isn’t Free: From the Greatest Generation to the Challenges of Today,” featuring former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney, former CIA Operations Officer Clare Lopez and retired Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, Jr., who provided insight into how such issues affect government policy.

Progressives who reflexively condemn religion in politics or any perceived trespass of faith into the affairs of state are strangely silent when the religion is Islam.  Incongruously, they often discourage free speech to avoid insulting radical beliefs.

The panel agreed that such muddled thinking influences the Obama administration’s views regarding national security and foreign policy.  Despite the global threat represented by ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and regardless of the nuclear danger posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, the White House has taken the dangerous road of appeasing the unappeasable.  Since his first days in office, President Obama has turned American foreign policy away from its traditional allies and towards an axis of regimes committed to doctrinal totalitarianism.

He seems driven by the progressive compulsion to validate claims of Arab-Muslim victimhood while denying the extremism and anti-Semitism so common in Islamic society.  Secular liberals often misrepresent Islamist aspirations by claiming that jihad means “introspection” or “inner striving,” and by denying the history of Islamic conquest in the Mideast, Asia, North Africa and Europe.  They also ignore the theological motivations for persecuting non-Arabic and non-Muslim indigenous peoples, such as Copts, Yazidis and Maronites.

Lenin described western leftists as “useful idiots” for supporting communism over their own national interests; the term applies to progressives today who defend or justify Islamism.  Frank Gaffney described the left-wing’s relationship with radical Islam as a “red-green alliance.”

According to Gaffney, the term “jihad” has only one meaning under Sharia, and that meaning is holy war.  He said it motivated the 9/11 attacks, the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, and the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish market in Paris earlier this year.  While not all Muslims support jihad –indeed many come to the West specifically to escape doctrinal extremism – there is no definition of the concept that preaches respect for “infidels” or their beliefs.

Those unable to engage in violent jihad, says Gaffney, are exhorted to engage in “civilizational jihad” by transforming western society from within.  The process includes disseminating propaganda in public schools, promoting sharia courts over civil courts, pursuing sharia-compliant financing requirements, and using societal institutions to assist in spreading the faith.  Gaffney said the existence of the “Civilizational-Jihadist Process” was confirmed in a Muslim Brotherhood documententitled, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” which sets forth mission and strategy.

The success of this program in the West, said Gaffney, is reflected by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s pervasive influence in the United Nations and the establishment of Sharia compliant zones throughout Europe.  This strategy is pursued in the U.S. through initiatives seeking civil recognition of sharia court jurisdiction, the circulation of educational materials produced by Islamist front organizations, legal and illegal immigration, and efforts to gain access to the White House and the security, defense and intelligence establishments.

Islamist intrusion in government (with the complicity of the left) affects national security through the adoption of policies contrary to American strategic interests, said former CIA officer Clare Lopez.  Progressive-Islamist cooperation, she said, was instrumental in purging the FBI’s clandestine library of materials deemed offensive to Islam – though these materials were essential for teaching how to identify Islamist terrorists – and in depriving the military of the means to spot Islamist sympathizers within the ranks.

According to Lopez, the shielding of Islamists from scrutiny is not simply a case of political correctness run amok, but of government policy to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and support its ascendancy in the Mideast.  She said this was the crux of Presidential Study Directive 11 (“PSD 11”), which reportedly called for backing the Brotherhood to force political change in the Mideast and North Africa.  Leaks from this classifieddocument suggest the administration supported the Brotherhood and related groups when they toppled governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, she explained.

This policy produced disastrous consequences across the region, said Lopez, observing that “the outcomes [were] chaotic … shortsighted and ignorant.”  These would have been egregious if only caused by negligence.  However, the uprisings misleadingly dubbed the democratic “Arab Spring” were ignited by a strategy that in itself “wasn’t error [but] policy,” she said.  These policy failures were especially glaring after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.

Lopez and the panel believe the Benghazi attack resulted from the administration’s support of militias linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in their quest to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi (and also the governments in Egypt and Tunisia).  Although Qaddafi had renounced terrorism, relinquished weapons of mass destruction, submitted to nuclear inspections, and jailed terrorists released from Gitmo, Islamist opposition militias in Libya were supported with arms funneled by the U.S. through Benghazi.  After he was overthrown, she said, weapons from Benghazi were redirected to anti-government militias in Syria.

During this time the Ansar al-Sharia moved near the consulate and called for attacks on Americans.  Lopez explained that when Ambassador Chris Stephens requested increased security, he was denied by Hillary Clinton’s State Department because of optics; with the 2012 election approaching, the administration wanted to continue claiming it had defeated al-Qaeda and won the war on terror.  Thus, despite multiple warnings of impending attack, no reinforcements were provided, the consulate was overrun and four Americans were killed.  According to Admiral Lyons, there were military assets in the region that could have been deployed, but which inexplicably were not.

The White House and State Department thereafter claimed the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a video critical of Islam – although information immediately available showed it was preplanned and unrelated to the video.  The ruse continued for weeks and included Mr. Obama’s statement during a “60 Minutes” interview the next day that it was “too early to know exactly how it came about” and Susan Rice’s repetition of the false video narrative during multiple television appearances.

As the administration supported Sunni militias aligned with the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Syria and North Africa, it pandered to Iranian Shiites around the Persian Gulf.  According to Lopez, Obama’s policy was to recognize Iran as the hegemonic power in the Mideast.  He thus snubbed Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia and embraced a Shiite regime that threatens those allies, condemns America as the “Great Satan,” seeks Israel’s destruction, and exports international terrorism.

The courting of extremist Sunnis on one side of the Mideast and apocalyptic Shiites on the other might seem incongruous, but Admiral Lyons sees it as consistent with the goal of fundamentally changing America.  “Never in my lifetime did I think I’d ever see America taken down by our own administration,” he said, observing that challenging U.S. influence is considered a progressive virtue.  Admiral Lyons believes that President Obama always intended to restructure national policy according to progressive ideals that disparage America, Israel and the West, and instead validate Islamist, Iranian and anti-western interests.

He cites as evidence the President’s use of sequestration to cut defense spending and disarm unilaterally at a time when China and Russia are growing in influence, militant Islam is on the rise, and military reductions are viewed as weakness.  “We’re headed for the smallest army since [before] World War II,” he said, noting that military experts are no longer certain the U.S. could prevail in a conventional regional conflict.  The question is how such fundamental changes could have occurred without significant opposition.

The answer, said the panel, lies in the pervasive acquiescence to anti-American priorities and sensibilities.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the liberal affinity for anti-blasphemy laws that contravene free speech.  The U.N. periodically entertains resolutions seeking to criminalize “slander” of Islam, and these are supported by progressive governments and NGOs.  Moreover, a number of European nations have enacted laws banning criticism of Islam as hate speech.

Though such laws would violate the First Amendment, many American progressives favor them as a way of curtailing “hate-speech” and encouraging diversity.  Even without such laws on the books, liberals often discourage free discourse by accusing those who criticize radical Islam of Islamophobia.  This attitude seems to pervade Obama’s denial of the religious basis of Islamist terrorism, and much of his Mideast policy.

The panel concluded that Obama’s policies have compromised America’s ability to defend itself and lead the world.  He has spurned Israel, appeased Islamists, reduced the military, enabled Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and refused to acknowledge the existential threat of ISIS.  These acts and omissions are not hallmarks of effective leadership, but of submission to a feckless worldview that has damaged U.S. power and influence to a degree that may not be easily reparable.

EDITORS NOTE: This op-ed column originally appeared in Arutz Sheva – IsraelNationalNews.com.

Israel’s Contribution towards Defeating the Islamic State

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Manfred Gerstenfeld, author of The War of a Million Cuts reviewed in the June 2015 New English Review, published a prescient essay mid-June in the Jerusalem Post. Gerstenfeld is the former Chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs that sponsored a symposium on his new book on June 22, 2015. It was on the difficulty of “defeating”, let alone “degrading” the resilient Islamic State-the self declared Caliphate, “Will defeating Islamic State take more than a generation? “ While addressing the myriad of threats in the Middle East and potentially in the West from Islamic State Jihadis, Gerstenfeld draws attention to the contributions from Israel’s experience fighting asymmetrical wars against Islamic extremists seeking its destruction.

Tunisian Jihadi gunman Seifddine Rezgui

Tunisian Jihadi gunman Seifddine Rezgui. Photo by Rami Al Lolah

There was a trio of bloody spectacles inspired by the Islamic State on the first Friday in Ramadan. In France there was the beheading of an American owned chemical company executive by a Muslim employee. In Tunisia there was a massacre at a beach resort killing and injuring among others dozens of British, Belgian, Irish and German tourists by a Kalishnikov-toting attacker. In Kuwait there was  the bombing of a Shia Mosque where several dozen  at prayers were killed or injured .

In January there were the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Casher Market attacks by Al Qaeda and ISIS inspired émigré Muslims that killed seventeen, including four French  Jews and a Tunisian Jew.  Last fall, we saw attacks in Sydney, Ottawa and Quebec. There were an ax attack injuring  New York police officers and a beheading of food service employee at a company in Oklahoma City both perpetrated by converts to Islam. Last month we had the attack by two Jihadis from Phoenix  who were killed  in an attempted attack a Mohammed Cartoon event in Garland, Texas. One of the speakers at the event  was Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) who is under 24/7 protection of the Royal Dutch Protective service because of threats against his life for his anti-Islam  views in the Netherlands and the EU.

Reuters reported Islamic State spokesman Muhammad al-Adnani urging brothers in the Muslim ummah in honor of the observances of Ramadan to undertake attacks on kaffirs, unbelievers,   whether Christians, Shiites or Sunnis opposing the self-declared Islamic State. He declared in an audio message, Jihadists should turn the holy month of Ramadan, which began last week, into a time of “calamity for the infidels … Shi’ites and apostate Muslims.”  Not lost on many is that June 29th marks the first anniversary  of the Islamic State  self declaration of a Caliphate by  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Gerstenfield’s op-ed was triggered by comments from US General James Allen, commander of the US-led coalition combating the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, suggesting that it might take a generation to defeat IS.  Gerstenfeld wrote:

General Allen’s remarks, whether realistic or not, can serve for more detailed reflection on what it would mean if IS -controlled territory of a substantial size in say 20 years from now. This would indeed have a major impact on the world order, or better said world disorder. It would also have particular consequences for the Muslim world, the West, Russia and many other countries. Israel and the Jews, though minor players, would be affected by the global impact and by possible targeted attacks by IS.

As far as the Muslim world is concerned, the Arab Spring has already added Libya, Yemen and Syria to the roster of failed countries. The continued existence of IS may cause Iraq and possibly other countries to be added to that list. As the Islamic State is an extremist Sunni movement, it is directly opposed to Shi’ite Muslims, with no inclination to compromise. The longer the Islamic State lasts, the greater the threat to the Shi’ites.

That would mean that eventually the Islamic State would likely confront Iran, the leading Shi’ite country. Iran has been an international troublemaker and hardly any external forces have reacted to it militarily in the current century. The more powerful the Islamic State becomes, the more it will have to challenge Iran.  As the Islamic State also opposes the Sunni countries presently ruled by various royal families, the instability in these countries would increase substantially as well. The same is true concerning Egypt.

[…]

The Islamic State calls for murder may bring with it a shift back toward terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreign jihadists. There have been threats and rumors of having them brought into Europe amongst the boat refugees arriving from Libya, or smuggled through the Balkans. … Yet if we speak about decades of sizable continued Islamic State activity, it is likely that there will be attacks from terrorists disguised as refugees.

[…]

Substantial Jihadi-caused terrorism in the West will lead to further stereotyping of all Muslims.

The previous massive influx of Muslims and its ensuing social problems, including the lack of successful integration, has already led to the rise and/or growth of anti-Islam nationalistic parties in various countries.

These include Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, the Swedish Democrats, and above all, France’s Front National. Substantial Muslim terrorism is not only likely to increase the popularity of these parties but will influence the positions of other parties, who will have to compete for the votes of those with harder positions regarding Islam.

What would all this mean for Jews living abroad? Not much good. Attacks on others are often followed by attacks on Jews.

Gerstenfeld notes the ability of Israel to contend with extremist Salafist jihadi Islamic groups. Groups equipped with advanced weaponry supplied by Iran or Russian and U.S. weapons stocks abandoned by Assad forces in Syria or Iraqi National Forces:

No other country has accumulated as much experience in effectively fighting Muslim terrorists of various kinds as Israel. Israeli know-how in this field is already in demand and that is only likely to increase.

This fact is not well-publicized, but in future it should be, to improve Israel’s image with the Western mainstream populations.

A second opportunity may lie in Israel using the anti- Islamic State (IS)  sentiment in the West to highlight that the majority Palestinian faction, Hamas, is not very different from IS. Israel hasn’t done much about this until now, but at the same time, the grounds for response from the West have been far less fertile than they may become in the future.

A third opportunity for Israel could be the possible change in political alliances in the Middle East. Some Arab states might consider that whatever hatred they promote of Israel to be less beneficial than allying them with Israel against IS, which has become a real threat to many Arab states. A recent poll showed that Saudis consider Iran to be their largest threat, followed by IS, and that Israel ranks third.

There has already been alleged secret meeting between Saudi military and Israeli security counterparts. Doubtless drawn together by the threat of a Shiite Mahdist Iran on the verge of becoming a nuclear threshold state destabilizing the Middle East. That is reflected in the Saudi undeclared war against the Houthi insurgency in the failed State of Yemen. An insurgency equipped and backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image of Islamic State fighters is courtesy of PamelaGeller.com.

Is Kurdistan Rising?

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In the Wall Street Journal Weekend edition, June 20-21, 2015, Yaroslav Trofimov writes of the possible rise of an independent Kurdistan, “The State of The Kurds”. An independent Kurdistan was promised by the WWI Allies in the Treaty of Sevres that ended the Ottoman Empire in 1920. That commitment was dashed by the rise of Turkish Republic under the secularist Kemal Atatürk confirmed in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne denying an independent Kurdistan in what is now Eastern Turkey. Combined a future Kurdistan encompassing eastern Turkey, Northern Syria, northwest Iran and northern Iraq might comprise a landlocked republic of 30 million with significant energy and agricultural resources. The rise of Kurdistan is reflected in these comments in the Trofimov WSJ review article:

Selahattin Demirtas, Chairman of the HDP party in Turkey:

The Kurds’ existence was not recognized; they were hidden behind a veil. But now, after being invisible for a century, they are taking their place on the international stage. Today, international powers can no longer resolve any issue in the Middle East without taking into account the interests of the Kurds.

Tahir Elçi, a prominent Kurdish lawyer and chairman of the bar in Diyarbakir, Turkey:

In the past, when the Kurds sought self-rule, the Turks, the Persians and the Arabs were all united against it. Today that’s not true anymore—it’s not possible for the Shiite government in Iraq and Shiite Iran to work together against the Kurds with the Sunni Turkey and the Sunni ISIS. In this environment, the Kurds have become a political and a military power in the Middle East.

Elçi, amplifies a concern that Sherkoh Abbas, leader of the Kurdish National Syria Assembly (KURDNAS) has expressed in several NER interviews an articles with him:

The PKK has made important steps to adopt more democratic ways. But you cannot find the same climate of political diversity in [Kurdish] Syria as you find in [northern Iraq], and this is because of PKK’s authoritarian and Marxist background. This is a big problem.

As effective as the KRG government and peshmerga have been in pushing back at ISIS forces threatening the capital of Erbil, the real problem is the divisiveness in the political leadership. That is reflected in the comment of  Erbil province’s governor, Nawaf Hadi cited by Trofimov:

For 80 years, the Arab Sunni people led Iraq—and they destroyed Kurdistan. Now we’ve been for 10 years with the Shiite people [dominant in Baghdad], and they’ve cut the funding and the salaries—how can we count on them as our partner in Iraq?” All the facts on the ground encourage the Kurds to be independent.

That renewed prospect reflects the constellation of  events in Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

The fall of the AKP government in the Turkish Election of June 7, 2015

There was  the  stunning  defeat of the 13 year reign of  the Islamist AKP headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by the trio of secular, nationalist and upstart Kurdish parties, the CHP, HNP and HDP that might form a minority ruling coalition 45 days from the June 7, 2014 parliamentary elections. These minority parties garnered a plurality of 299 seats in the Ankara Parliament.  That is if these parties can coalesce. If not Islamist figurehead President Erdogan seek new elections if they can’t put together a new ruling government.  A Washington, D.C. forum on what the results of the Turkish  election convened by the Foundation for Defense  of Democracies (FDD) forum presented nuanced views. Watch this C-Span video of the FDD forum.

FDD Senior Counselor John Hannah moderated the discussion with former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and FDD Senior Advisor  former US Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman and FDD Non-Resident Fellow and former member of Turkish parliament Ayman Erdemir.

John Hannah

June 7 in my opinion was an inspiring performance, a much needed triumph of the spirit of liberal democracy in a Middle East landscape currently inundated with way too much bad news.

For those of us who have watched over the past decade with great dismay the slow drip of Turkey’s democracy being drained away by Erdogan’s creeping Islamism and authoritarianism, we frankly weren’t sure anymore if the Turkish people had this kind of an election in them.

Aykan Erdemir

My take-home message would be that we should not read these elections too much with a progressive, liberal-democratic interpretation. But we should not underemphasize the importance of it either, because ultimately June 7 proved to us that there could be a return from competitive authoritarianism, where an incumbent with huge advantages nevertheless can suffer a relative defeat in the ballot box.

I have always argued that Erdogan’s policies and politics cannot be interpreted within the nation-state borders. Erdogan’s policies right from the start have been transnational; it has always been a Muslim Brotherhood-oriented policy, whether in Syria, Jordan, or Egypt. He is a visionary transnationalist politician.”

Ambassador Edelman

Turkey is a deeply polarized society, and the bad news there is that the AKP is the only party that is competitive across the nation.

Erdogan will not see this vote in any way as inhibiting him in creating an executive presidency. …My suspicion is that Erdogan does not want to see a government formed within the 45-day period set by the constitution and would like to see the country go back to elections. He thinks that if he could apply the ‘keep voting until I get the right answer’ standard, there is a chance he will do better in a second election, get at least a governing majority if not the super-majority.

Dr. Harold Rhode, former Turkish and Islamic Affairs expert in the Office of the Secretary of Defense held a more optimistic view cited in a JNS.org article on the Turkish Elections, “noting that he personally knows pro-American and pro-Israel officials “within the senior leadership of all three of the [non-AKP] parties.”

Syrian YPG Fighters capture Tal Abyad Reuters

Syrian YPG fighters capture Tal-Abyad from ISIS, June 2015. Source: Reuters.

Syrian Kurdish YPG victory at strategic border town of  Tal-Abyad

The second development was the victory by Syrian Kurdish PYG fighters , Christian Assyrian and secular  FSA militias  wresting the strategic border gateway of Tal-Abyad  from  ISIS with support from  US coalition air strikes. This followed the  January 2015 victory in  the siege at the border  city of Kobani. The Syrian PYG, affiliated with the Turkish PKK, a  terrorist group designated by  Turkey, EU and the US, whose leader Abdullah Ocalan is under house arrest in Turkey,  has been assisted  by fighting units of the Iraqi Peshmerga from the adjacent Kurdish Regional Government  (KRG)in northern Iraq.  The third development was the KRG Peshmerga wresting   control  of Kirkuk and its vast  oil field. Kirkuk, as Trofimov noted  is considered  the “Kurdish Jerusalem” .  Not to be outdone by Kurdish compatriots in Syria and Iraq, in mid-May 2015, Iranian Kurdish  Party of Free Life in Kurdistan ( PJAK)  forces in northwestern Iran’s Zagros mountain  fought  Iranian security forces in Mahabad.  Mahabad  was the capital of the short-lived State of Republic  Kurdistan established with Soviet Russian support in  Iran in 1945- 1946.

KRG Delegation meets with resident Obama VO Biden and National Security Council May 2015

Kurdish President Barzani and KRG delegation meet President Obama and VP Biden May 2015.

KRG Meets with President to Free up Arms Deliveries

The KRG quest for independence has been stymied by the Baghdad government of PM Haidar al-Abadi.  The Baghdad  government has not lived up to its agreement reached in December 2014 to provide regular payments to the KRG amounting  to nearly $5.7 billion in exchange for selling 550,000 barrels of oil. The result has been that KRG government  and the 160,000 Peshmerga force have not been paid in months.  More troubling has been the current agreements between the Obama Administration  and  the al-Abadi government for allocation and deliveries of heavy weapons that have not found their way to the highly effective Peshmerga fighting force. This is especially galling given the thousands of Humvees, mobile artillery, anti-tank, main battle tanks and MRAP vehicles abandoned by fleeing Iraqi national security forces in the conquest of Mosul in June 2014 and Ramadi in late May.

A  meeting occurred in Washington in early May 2015 with  KRG President Barzani and senior officials with President Obama, Vice President Biden and members of the National  Security Staff seeking resolution of this impasse.   Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near Policy wrote about this in a May 15, 2015 Al Jazeera, article, “A big win for Kurds at the White House”:

From May 3-8, 2015, Washington D.C. hosted a high-powered delegation from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). KRG President Massoud Barzani was flanked by Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani, National Security Chancellor Masrour Barzani and Minister of Peshmerga Affairs Mustapha Sayyid Qadr, among other KRG ministers and officials.  [The delegation was originally scheduled for a five minute meeting with President Obama, instead the session lasted an hour].

In particular, the Kurds complained that Washington has allocated too small a proportion of its $1.6bn Iraq Train and Equip Fund (ITEF) assistance to Kurdistan.

Slow and indirect delivery of US weapons systems is a connected concern. Washington has chosen to funnel most weapons shipments via the federal Iraqi Ministry of Defense, the only entity entitled by US law to sign end-user certificates (EUCs) for the weapons.

[…]In reaction to these views, the House Armed Services Committee of the US Congress introduced clauses into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Pentagon’s budget, in an attempt to protect the Kurds’ fair share of US weapons.

The draft NDAA for Fiscal Year 2016 was amended by congress to include a clause (Section 1223) that named the Peshmerga as one of a number of security forces collectively entitled to “not less than 25 percent” of the annual $715m of US support.

Most controversially the amendment would allow the KRG “as a country” to “directly receive assistance from the United States” if Baghdad failed to meet the aforementioned condition, a clause that sparked security threats from Shia militia leaders against US trainers in Iraq.

Baghdad protested the language, and US Vice President Joe Biden signaled one day before the Kurdish delegation landed that “all US military assistance in the fight against [ISIL] comes at the request of the Government of Iraq and must be coordinated through the Government of Iraq”.

[…]

Instead of trying to force the White House to do Kurdistan’s bidding through pressure politics, Barzani seems to have adopted a longer-term view in his dealings with the US on defense.

Section 1223 did not give the Kurds a great deal – sharing a quarter of US material collectively with Sunni Arab paramilitary recipients – but it would have soured relations with the Obama administration at a critical time.

Israeli Support for an Independent Kurdistan

One  Middle East nation that  supports an independent Kurdistan  is Israel . As exemplified by comments from  Israeli Prime Minister  Netanyahu, Israel supports the creation of an independent Kurdistan in  Iraq.  There is a long connection between the Kurds and the Jewish nation. There is  an estimated 150,000 Kurdish Jewish  population in Israel that has fostered  cultural –linguistic exchanges with Iraqi Kurdistan.  Iraqi and Iranian kurds smuggled Iraqi Jews to freedom via Iran, during the days of the late Shah, to Israel and the West.  Iranian Kurds continued that effort despite  the Islamic republic facilitating the departure of Iranian Jews  via Turkey to reach  Israel.  From the 1950’s to the mid-70’s Israel provided covert military training and  equipment  to Iraqi Kurds  against the Ba’athist regime of the late Saddam Hussein.  That ended with a treaty between the late Shah of Iran and Hussein orchestrated by Henry Kissinger in 1975.  During the 1980’s Hussein took his revenge on Iraqi kurds during the  Iran-Iraq War  in a series of genocidal revenge campaigns including a massive gas attack that killed thousands decimating Kurdish villages.   Israel currently hosts the huge U.S. War Reserve Stock for use in Middle East conflicts. Perhaps, the Obama Administration might relent on the current agreements with the Baghdad government and permit transfers from the US War Reserve Stock   in Israel of much needed weapons, equipment and munitions to the Peshmerga in Iraq and the Syrian Kurdish militias fighting ISIS.  Israel is less than several hundred miles from Erbil.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of supporters cheering Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP, in Istanbul, Turkey, in May, 2015. Source: Emrah Gurel/AP.

Reign of Terror: Inside the Islamic State

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In FrontPage today, I discuss new gruesome details that have emerged of life inside the Islamic State.

The Islamic State’s caliphate turns one year old on June 29, and few inside its domains, aside from the true believers who have traveled all over the world to live in the Islamic promised land, are likely to be celebrating. Like all totalitarian states, it has swiftly established for its citizens an environment of oppression and fear, supported (in a new twist) not by a personality cult centered upon the specter of a ubiquitous, all-seeing, all-knowing leader, but by the guilt-manipulation of religious duty. Obey the Islamic State’s dictates, no matter how egregious, or else you’ll not just be tortured and brutally murdered, but you’ll burn in hell besides.

And so those deemed to be ideologically deviant are not labeled “counterrevolutionaries” or “imperialist running dogs” or “capitalist roaders,” but “heretics,” and are made to carry “repentance cards.”

A repentance card is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, however. Everyone in the Islamic State must show signs of his or her repentance and devoutness in Islam every day, or else. Breaking the law in the Islamic State can get you lashed or even beheaded – even for “infractions” such as these, many of which are classic Sharia provisions and thus are found in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere as well:

  • Women must cover their entire body except face and hands. (According to some reports, they must cover their faces as well.)
  • Women may not leave the house without a male accompanying them.
  • Only women may sell clothing to women.
  • Women must not wear high heels, but only flat-soled shoes.
  • Not only drugs and alcohol, but cigarettes are forbidden.
  • Those who leave Islam are to be killed.
  • Graves and shrines are forbidden, and are to be destroyed.

There are other rules as well – many recalling Woody Allen’s Republic of San Marcos. Women may not wear makeup or sit in a chair. Men may not cut their hair, put gel in it, or wear it in a “modern style.” Men may not wear low-hanging jeans (okay, for that one I’m booking my ticket to Raqqa now). Just as postwar Vietnamese were forbidden to utter the name “Saigon,” in the Islamic State no one may refer to the ruling group as “Daesh,” the Arabic acronym for the group’s former name, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Those wearing soccer jerseys will receive 80 lashes. And several weeks ago, Islamic State clerics banned pigeon breeding: the sight of the birds’ genitals as they flew overhead was un-Islamic.

That’s right: this is a state that legislates about pigeon genitals. But no one is laughing, as it commands respect at the point of a gun.

That’s also how it inspires Islamic piety. A deserter from the Islamic State has recounted that Islamic State prisons in Raqqa are filled with people were not sufficiently reverent during prayers or who have uttered the name of Allah in a way that Islamic State authorities deemed blasphemous. Their Islamic State captors torture them with sticks and cattle prods, and occasionally even burn prisoners to death.

Sharia forbids music, and so playing music on your car radio can get you ten lashes. Just as in Saudi Arabia, stores must close during the time for Islamic prayers.

And there is no recourse within the Islamic State itself. No political parties or armed groups are allowed other than the Islamic State. The ruling elites exert control over their people so tightly as to arouse the envy of Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot: inside the caliphate’s capital of Raqqa, in the experience of one man who lived there, “the once colorful, cosmopolitan Syrian provincial capital has been transformed…Now, women covered head to toe in black scurried quickly to markets before rushing home. Families often didn’t leave home to avoid any contact with the ‘Hisba’ committees, the dreaded enforcers of the innumerable ISIS regulations.”

Raqqa’s central square is now known as Hell Square, as it is where the Islamic State carries out public executions, often leaving the dead bodies on display for days, as a warning to the living.

There is no end in sight. “People hate them,” said one man whose family lives in the Islamic State, “but they’ve despaired, and they don’t see anyone supporting them if they rise up. People feel that nobody is with them.” In fact, lots of people are with them: Barack Obama, who has vowed to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, but done little to make good on his vow; the Iranians, the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad, the Assad regime in Damascus, the Kurds, and a host of others. None of them, however, have the will or the means so far to deliver the knockout blow to this evil state. And so the citizens of the caliphate are in for, at very least, a second year of misery.

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That Imaginary War Room by Hugh Fitzgerald

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We have all had fantasies — have we not? — of being President or Chief of Staff, and being present, somewhere in the Pentagon, in a War Room that, we like to think, directs that campaign of self-defense against the hydra-headed Jihad.

And we like to imagine, too, what might go on in that room, what kinds of things we hope are being discussed and planned.

Consider, among the many imagined scenarios, these three:

1) A War Room devoted to the counter-Jihad in the Muslim World itself. In this War Room, the computers bristle with information about the active fighting going on in the Middle East and North Africa (Libya) and Central Asia (Afghanistan), and with news of what war materiel has been requested, and is being sent, and what troops have been sent, too, to Egypt, to Iraq, to Jordan, to Yemen, to a dozen other possible places. And there are solemn debates about how to keep the countries of the Middle East from being “failed states” and succeeding, thanks to our help, with the assumption being that this is the only conceivably correct goal.

2) A War Room devoted to the domestic front — for by now there would be recognition that there is a war inside our countries, too. That would take the form of non-military aid being given to “moderate” Muslims in the United States and Western Europe, who, if only they are given enough access to, and support from, Western leaders and the media, and funds, too (as the French government supplies so generously to what it thinks are “tame because government-subsidised mosques” in France), these “moderates” will be able to sway the local Muslims, now within the West by the millions, to embrace, unswervingly, democratic ideals, and what those ideals imply, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. And little is said about what is in the Qur’an and Hadith; for the planners, such a discussion would only complicate matters, would make what they are doing seem even less plausible, would show up the egg on too many faces. So what is in the Qur’an, as glossed by the Sunnah (Hadith and Sira), doesn’t come up. It’s “real people” who are being kept in mind in this particular War Room.

3) Finally, in the third of our imagined War Rooms, everyone is already well-versed in Islam, and disinclined to deny what is contained in the texts; disinclined, too, to find reasons to explain or interpret away those texts. The strategies of denial that were in fashion for so very long, despite all the evidence, have finally been put to rest. And it is the members of this hard-headed group, chastened by more than a decade of experience dealing with Islam and Muslim peoples, in this War Room, on whose computer screens would be displayed the strategies for demoralizing and dividing the Camp of Islam. Not much about soldiers and weapons here, for military intervention in Muslim lands is not regarded as much use. It has only allowed Muslims to blame the interfering Infidels, and not one another, nor themselves. But in this War Room, measures are discussed to limit, in the West, the survival — or still worse, spread — of intellectual bromides about Islam that do not correspond to what the best-prepared students of the subject, which includes the “defectors” from Islam such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Wafa Sultan, and Ibn Warraq, tell us that Islam inculcates. The internecine conflicts within the Muslim world would not be deplored, but regarded with grim satisfaction, knowing that such conflicts have no natural end.

Indeed, who thinks the conflict in Syria will come to an end, or that Syria itself can possibly be reconstituted? How exactly would the bitterest of enemies now make peace and live together? It isn’t possible. Instead, in this War Room the discussion would be about how refusing to intervene leads to a better outcome for the West, if not for Muslims.

And in this War Room, a great deal of the planning would be about how best to support and protect  non-Muslim figures, especially those members of the media who, having prepared themselves at length by appropriate reading of Qur’an and Hadith, and a lot else besides, are of great national worth, for everyone who writes in a no-nonsense fashion about Islam has overcome an atmosphere of such nonsense and lies as to deserve a Pulitzer just for that mental persistence. Instead of mockery, they deserve  thanks, support, and dissemination of their message.

The theme of the third imagined War Room is Division and Demoralization — of Muslims. This involves exploiting, often by not moving to mend, the fissures within the Muslim Camp, the main one being that between Sunni and Shi’a, but there are also the ethnic hostilities between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, most obviously between Arab and Kurd in Iraq, but hardly limited to that case. The non-Arabs can be encouraged to note, and resent, the conviction of the Arabs that they are superior in the Muslim hierarchy, that it is right that non-Arabs must forget their own histories and civilization, for as Muslims they must  read the Qur’an in Arabic, turn Arabia-wards five times a day in prayer, emulate the mores of 7th century Arabs, and ideally take Arab names. That resentment surely can be encouraged; the rich pre-Islamic pasts of many Muslim peoples could be written and spoken about, and the consciousness raised about how Islam has razed history the way the Islamic State has razed historical monuments.

Of the three, which do you favor? Do you think constant military intervention, and especially the wars in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, and the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya, have been a wise use of Western resources? Is Islam weaker as a result? Has the West been made more secure? And is the Muslim presence in the West smaller or larger, and growing? Has the experience of the past 15 years made a sufficient number of people in the West more aware of what they face, or simply anxious and confused, and feeling things are out of their hands, “there is nothing we can do,” for example, when our governments increase the number of Muslim immigrants?

Have the “moderate Muslims” in Europe, other than an occasional showy denunciation of this or that Islamic State outrage as “un-Islamic,” done a single thing to further the right education of non-Muslims, and to come to grips with the need to discuss, in order if possible to modify (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali holds out, just, as a possibility), through interpretation, what is contained in the Qur’an and, especially, the Hadith? They have not, and they cannot. So it is up to the people in that imaginary third War Room to help create demoralization, as well as to do nothing to prevent division within the Camp of Islam.

How many Muslims are capable of interpreting the Qur’an in such a way, and ignoring so much of the Hadith, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests will be necessary if there is to be co-existence, or any sort of harmony? Many? Few? And how might one encourage their numbers to grow, or even to encourage people to do that seemingly impossible thing, leave Islam altogether? One way, as those in that third War Room know, is to make public as much news about the relative performance of Muslim peoples and states as possible. Long ago, the scholar Armand Abel wrote an article that deserves widespread study:  “Underdevelopment, stagnation, and decadence. The study of a psychotype: the case of Islam.” Why is it that Muslim states have not created modern economies? The handful of Croesus-rich oil sheikdoms are not exceptions; they are rentier-economies, dependent on the result of an accident of geology. What Muslim state has succeeded, or put differently, is it not true that those Muslim states that have either had a significant non-Muslim population (as Lebanon and Malaysia) or a long secular history (Kemalist Turkey), have created those economies not dependent on the three mainstays of most Muslim states: oil, Western tourism, Western foreign aid?

This third War Room would conduct a campaign to unsettle and demoralize the enemy, a war of propaganda. It involves holding up, for constant inspection and discussion, all the ways that Islam itself can be considered a retrograde (Churchill’s word) force. Does Islam encourage democracy, or in Islam is the despot to be obeyed as long as he is Muslim? Does Islam encourage economic innovation, or does Islam denounce bida (innovation, new ways of doing things)? Does Islam encourage equality of the sexes and equal treatment of minorities under law? What is the evidence that we see before us, presented in the news every day? Does Islam encourage people to think for themselves, or does it discourage free and skeptical inquiry? Have you heard of anyone being lashed recently, or attacked by a mob, or killed, because that someone dared to question something about Islam? Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, the freethinkers hacked to death in Bangladesh, the endless attacks on those who dare to think for themselves in Pakistan, the endless prison sentences meted out in Iran — what should we make of this, if not that Islam does indeed punish free inquiry? Can’t you feel sympathy for the people living in these places, who think for themselves but can never express it?

The third War Room would offer subventions to publishers, so that works by ex-Muslims, as valuable as that of defectors from the KGB, would appear, in millions of copies, small in format so that they could be easily smuggled in, and of course — most important — there would be websites, well-publicized websites, where such works could be read in full.

Islam itself is the source of the many failures, political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual, of Muslims themselves. How many times have I said this? It is the spelling out of that proposition that requires efforts, at length,  ad nauseam, till it all seems so obvious that no one in his right mind could disagree. That is the task of this ideal War Room. Political failure: the despot is permitted in Islam; the citizen, rather than the subject, protected by civil rights that we take for granted in the West, does not exist. That is not complicated to say, but apparently complicated enough so that many refuse to understand.  Economic failure: inshallah-fatalism, the belief that everything is in the hands of Allah, who can undo our efforts at whim, and to whom we also owe our riches (and the oil of the Gulf might be seen to confirm it), suggests to Muslims that neither hard work, nor entrepreneurial flair, are either sufficient or necessary. And the readiness of the West to supply aid to so many Muslim states has allowed them to think of this, too, as a kind of jizyah, a tribute exacted on the non-Muslims to which they willingly submit, manna that will not stop.

Those in the third War Room should not be swayed by talk of “failed states.” They should stop all American aid to Muslim states, in order to allow the economic failures of Islam to become more apparent to Muslims themselves. Social failures: the War Room will promote discussion of how women are mistreated in Islam, how minorities are treated, and why these reflect the teachings of Islam, clearly misogynistic and clearly uninterested in the position of non-Muslim minorities. Moral failures: vide the Islamic State. Or see how both sides treat the other side in Syria or Libya or Yemen or Iraq. This is what that War Room should be publicizing, talking about, forcing Muslims to talk about.

The Islamic basis for Muslim failure is now much more widely understood among non-Muslims; websites such as this one have had a considerable role in forcing this understanding. But the trick is to force Muslims to understand the sources of their own unhappinesses of so many different kinds. Look at Al-Sisi. Do you not sense in him someone who knows that Islam has to be modified, or re-interpreted, or if nothing else will work, ruthlessly constrained, as he is doing with the True Believers the Muslim Brotherhood? For Al-Sisi is afraid of the effect of too much Islam, taken straight up, on the minds of True Believers. And that is because he has spent decades thinking about Islam, and having studied in the United States, surely noted from afar the very failures that we’ve been discussing.

Would that in the Pentagon and the White House there were more who have come to the conclusion that Islam itself, with its amazing power over the minds of men, is the problem. Then imagine a thousand articles commissioned by that War Room from authorities in different fields: economists would write about the lack of major innovation in Islamic world, political scientists would write about  the persistence of despotism in the Islamic world, sociologists would study the comparative treatment of women, and the position of minorities; psychologists would write about the moral insensitivity of Muslims to the suffering of their enemies (see those Yazidi women). This would create an atmosphere — call it demoralization —  that could force Muslims to admit that something was wrong, and then to begin to analyze the problem correctly, and not find themselves suppressed. The ability to think would come, albeit slowly. All of this has been said before, and all must be said again and again.

But isn’t this the essential strategy worth trying, not only in that Ideal War Room of our imagination, but in the real one?

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The Islamic State is the Fourth Reich by V.S. Naipaul

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A grotesque love of propaganda. Unspeakable barbarity. The loathing of Jews – and a hunger for world domination. In this stunning intervention, literary colossus V.S. Naipaul says ISIS is now the Fourth Reich

Imagine a world in which a young man is locked in a cage, has petrol showered over him and is set alight to be burnt alive.

Imagine the triumphant jeering of an audience that has gathered to witness this. Imagine, also, a 12-year-old child with elated determination on his features shooting at close range a kneeling man with his arms tied behind his back.

Then picture the spectacle of a hundred beheadings of victim after victim in humiliating uniforms, their hands and feet bound, kneeling with their backs to their black-robed executioners who wield knives to cut their throats as though they were sacrificial lambs.

Picture queues of helpless men and women being marched by zealous executioners who nail them to wooden crosses and crucify them, howling and bleeding to death as crowds watch.

Then picture thousands of girls and women, their arms tied, being marched by hooded and armed captors into sexual slavery. And then, if that is not enough, picture men being thrown off cliffs to their deaths because they are accused of being gay.

Yes, all these scenes could have taken place in several continents in the medieval world, but they were captured on camera and broadcast to anyone with access to the internet. These are scenes, of yesterday, today and tomorrow in our own world.

I have always distrusted abstractions and have turned into writing what I could discover and explore for myself.

So I must begin by admitting that I have not recently travelled in those regions threatened by barbarism — the Middle East, the north west of Africa, in pockets of Pakistan and in the Islamic countries of south eastern Asia.

However, in the 1980s and early 1990s I undertook to examine the ‘revival’ of Islam that was taking place through the revolution in Iran and the renewed dedication to the religion of other countries.

I travelled through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia attempting to discover the ideas and convictions behind this new ‘fundamentalism’.

My first book was called Among The Believers and the second, perhaps prophetically, Beyond Belief. Since those books were written, the word ‘fundamentalism’ has taken on new meanings.

As the word suggests, it means going back to the groundings, to the foundations and perhaps to first principles. It is used to characterise the interpretation given to passages of the Koran, to the Hadith, which is a collection of the acts in the life of the Prophet Mohammed and to an interpretation of sharia law.

However, the particular fundamentalist ideology of ‘Islamist’ groups that have dedicated themselves to terror — such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and now in its most vicious, barbaric and threatening form the Islamic Caliphate, Isis or the Islamic State (IS) — interprets the foundation and the beginning as dating from the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the 6th Century.

This fundamentalism denies the value and even the existence of civilisations that preceded the revelations of the Koran.

It was an article of 6th and 7th Century Arab faith that everything before it was wrong, heretical. There was no room for the pre-Islamic past.

So an idea of history was born that was fundamentally different from the ideas of history that the rest of the world has evolved.

In the centuries following, the world moved on. Ideas of civilisation, of other faiths, of art, of governance of law and of science and invention grew and flourished.

This Islamic ideological insistence on erasing the past may have survived but it did so in abeyance, barely regarded even in the Ottoman Empire which declared itself to be the Caliphate of all Islam.

Islamic State is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust

But now the evil genie is out of the bottle. The idea that faith abolishes history has been revived as the central creed of the Islamists and of Isis.

Their determination to deny, eliminate and erase the past manifests itself in the destruction of the art, artefacts and archaeological sites of the great empires, the Persian, the Assyrian and Roman that constitute the histories of Mesopotamia and Syria.

They have bulldozed landmarks in the ancient city of Dur Sharukkin and smashed Assyrian statues in the Mosul museum. Destroying the winged bull outside the fortifications of Nineveh satisfies the same reductive impulse behind the destruction by the Taliban of the Bhumiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has described this destruction of art, artefacts, inscriptions and of the museums that house them not only as a butchery of civilisational memory but as a war crime.It is telling that the victims of Wednesday’s barbarous shootings were visitors to the great Bardo Museum in Tunis, a repository of art and material from Tunisia’s rich, pre-Islamic past.Isis is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust. It has pledged itself to the murder of Shias, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis and anyone it can, however fancifully, accuse of being a spy. It has wiped out the civilian populations of whole regions and towns. Isis could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.

bulldozing historic statues

Isis has bulldozed landmarks in the ancient city of Dur Sharukkin and smashed Assyrian statues in the Mosul museum (pictured).

Like the Nazis, Isis fanatics are anti-semitic, with a belief in their own racial superiority. They are anti-democratic: the Islamic State is a totalitarian state, absolute in its authority. There is even the same self-regarding love of symbolism, presentation and propaganda; terror is spread to millions through films and videos created to professional standards of which Goebbels would have been proud.

Just as the Third Reich did, Isis categorises its enemies as worthy of particular means of execution from decapitation to crucifixion and death by fire.

Whereas the Nazis pretended to be the guardians of civilisation in so far as they stole art works to preserve them and kept Jewish musicians alive to entertain them, Isis destroys everything that arises from the human impulse to beauty.

Such barbarism is not new to history and every nation has suffered mass murder and barbaric cruelty in the past.

That Isis has revived the religious dogmas and deadly rivalries between Sunnis and Shias, Sunnis and Jews and Christians is a giant step into darkness.

That a European country in the 20th Century launched a holocaust on the basis of race is a matter of the deepest shame

The Arab lands, relatively stable under the Ottoman Empire, were divided up by the British and French victors of the First World War into the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Jordan at the Cairo Conference of 1920. Borders were drawn in straight lines and the sons of the Mufti of Mecca imposed on the newly carved territories as kings.

Winston Churchill was advised at the Cairo conference by T. E. Lawrence and by Gertrude Bell, who should have known that the Shia would not readily welcome or acknowledge a Sunni king and vice versa.

After upheavals, rebellions and military coups, the region settled down under dictatorships in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Ba’athist Party was, in some senses, a modernising force and Saddam Hussein, though a Sunni, ruled the predominantly Shia and partly Kurd nation of Iraq with a ruthless hand. Wherever two or three were gathered in the name of the Almighty, he sent in his police.

He may not have been a savoury character but his overarching policies were holding on to power and modernising Iraq.

He was the cat that kept the rats of Islamism at bay. His invasion of Kuwait, another artificial sheikdom, poor in territory at the knee of Iraq but rich in oil, triggered the international reaction against him. The Bush-Blair alliance invaded Iraq and the puppet regime they set up executed Saddam. In the absence of the cat, the rats ran riot.

And so it has proved throughout the region. The Libyans, with the assistance of a European alliance, overthrew Gaddafi. The country is now at the mercy of Islamic militants. The same Arab Spring saw democratic protest against the Egyptian dictator and resulted for a while in an elected regime veering towards the repressions of Islamism.

It was overthrown by a military coup whose leader, General el-Sisi, speaking to the clerics and supposed scholars of the authoritative Islamic university Al-Azhar, called on them to denounce Isis as the greatest threat to international peace and exhorted them to declare the ideology of Isis a heresy. The mullahs of Al-Azhar have not as yet complied.

In Syria, the conflict of groups opposed to the government of Bashar Al-Assad resolved itself in the formation of a Sunni Islamicist militia, which in turn evolved — after a significant bloodletting — into Isis.

Are Isis and its followers heretics? The politicians of Europe and America, including David Cameron, Barack Obama and Francois Hollande, after every Islamicist outrage insist on describing them as a lunatic fringe. Their constant refrain is that these perpetrators of murder and terror have as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity or the testament of Jesus Christ. But does such political assurance bear scrutiny?

nazis pretended to be civilized

Whereas the Nazis pretended to be the guardians of civilisation in so far as they stole art works to preserve them and kept Jewish musicians alive to entertain them, Isis destroys everything that arises from the human impulse to beauty.

Of course the politicians, church leaders and others who say ‘these atrocities have nothing to do with Islam’ are not making a researched or considered theological statement. They are attempting, quite rightly, to prevent civil discord in a world in which there are considerable Muslim immigrant populations in most countries of Europe and in the US.

So what impels the tiny minority of young men and women from immigrant communities to volunteer themselves to ‘jihad’ and to almost certain self-destruction, or young women to abscond from their families and from European reality to become jihadi brides.

When I visited Pakistan, I discovered what I have characterised as the effects of an ideological nurture. The Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim is taught that he or she has no historical antecedents before the conquest of parts of India and its conversion to the faith.

The pressures of poverty and promise bring this Muslim to Britain. He and his family don’t speak English.

They are confined to work and live in an exclusively immigrant area of an inner city — say Bradford, Tower Hamlets or parts of Greater Manchester or Birmingham.

Their children are raised as Muslims, some strict some not so strict, and are sent to the normal city schools which soon become almost exclusively immigrant.

Some find that the values that traditionally inform them are at variance with those of the lives they see around them. This is true for even those Muslim young men and women who are being educated, through Britain’s by-and-large egalitarian system, to be surgeons or computer programmers.

Islamism is simpler. There are rules to obey, a jihad to fight against the civilisation you can’t comprehend, a heaven to go to when you martyr yourself and now a real fighting force in the world which you can join to simplify and solve your existence: no history to complicate your self-awareness, no art to distract you, no ambivalence and choices that ‘Western’ civilisation offers you, no doubt about the fruits of martyrdom, no allegiance to the country in which you were brought up and which gave you a free education and perhaps welfare benefits. A gun, a half-understood prayer and the simplicity that a simple and singular upbringing craves.

That is why they go. And volunteer for death, and die.

In the past three or four centuries since Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, Islam remained encrypted in the revelations of the Koran and the Hadith of a 6th Century life.

The expansion of the scientific enquiry coincided with or possibly caused the maritime expansion of European colonialism. Empirical science, the progress of liberal religion and the germination of modern democratic ideas coincided with European colonial dominion over Asia and Africa.

The process of decolonisation in the 20th Century gave rise to the idea that every advance in civilisation, scientific or democratic, was to be condemned as ‘colonial’. There may be no ideological answer to such bigotry.

The Islamic world does contain currents that are opposed to the interpretations that Isis gives to the Koran, the Hadith and to sharia. These are yet to declare themselves.

Though the appeal of Isis can be challenged by other strands of Islam, its murderous presence persists in the failed states of Iraq and war-torn Syria and threatens to spread through northern Africa.

The crippled Iraqi government has launched its reluctant armies against Isis. The Iranians, being Shias opposed to Sunni Caliphates, are supporting the Iraqi army and the Shia militias, who are a considerable force independent of the Iraqi government, are in a coalition to fight Isis on the ground. With air support from the West, they may manage to push Isis back.

Such an offensive, with the immediate objective of regaining Iraqi territory has to be urgently expanded. Isis has to be seen as the most potent threat to the world since the Third Reich.

Its military annihilation as an anti-civilisational force has to now be the objective of a world that wants its ideological and material freedoms.

ABOUT V.S. NAIPAUL

VS Naipaul

The Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul has warned that Islamic State are the most potent threat to the world since the Nazis.The Daily Mail (UK) wrote of this article: In a hard-hitting article in today’s Mail on Sunday, the revered novelist brands the extremist Muslim organisation as the Fourth Reich, saying it is comparable to Adolf Hitler’s regime in its fanaticism and barbarity.

Calling for its ‘military annihilation,’ the Trinidadian – born British writer says IS is ‘dedicated to a contemporary holocaust’, has a belief in its own ‘racial superiority,’ and produces propaganda that Goebbels would be proud of.

A long-term critic of Islam as a global threat, he also challenges those who say the extremists have nothing to do with the real religion of Islam, suggesting that the simplicity of some interpretations of the faith have a strong appeal to a minority.

The author of A House For Mr Biswas, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, is known for his sharp views.

He has likened Tony Blair to a pirate whose socialist revolution had imposed a ‘plebeian culture’ on Britain and found himself embroiled in controversy in 2001 by comparing Islam to colonialism, saying the faith ‘has had a calamitous effect’ as converts must deny their heritage.”

EDITORS NOTE: This article originally appeared  on March 21, 2015 in the Daily Mail (UK) and is archived here.

Islamic State recruiting ‘highly trained foreigners’ to produce chemical weapons

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How can they attract “highly trained foreigners” when they represent, as every Western authority will tell us, a twisted version of Islam that outrages all of the true, peaceful principles of the religion? The cognitive dissonance is absolute, but no one in any position of power or influence seems to notice or care.

“Isis recruiting ‘highly trained foreigners’ to produce chemical weapons,” by Alexander Ward, the Independent, June 7, 2015:

The terrorist group Isis is recruiting “highly trained professionals” to make chemical weapons – and has already used them in an attack.

The Australian Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, said the group was now undertaking “serious efforts” to develop their chemical weapons arsenal.

Speaking to the Australia Group, which is composed of nations against chemical weapons, she said: “Da’esh [Isis] is likely to have amongst its tens of thousands of recruits the technical expertise necessary to further refine precursor materials and build chemical weapons,” Ms Bishop added.

Ms Bishop’s speech is the latest concern that Isis is attempting to acquire nuclear and chemical and biological weapons, after India warned the extremists could obtain a nuclear weapon from Pakistan.

It was reported in March that Isis had been attacking Iraqi soldiers with roadside bombs containing chlorine gas in fighting around Tikrit, after footage emerged showing plumes of orange smoke emerging for the bombs.

It follows similar allegations that the extremists had released toxic gases in the eastern district of Kobani, during the siege of the town on the Syrian border, although it could not be confirmed.

Ms Bishop added: “Apart from some crude and small scale endeavours, the conventional wisdom has been that the terrorist intention to acquire and weaponise chemical agents has been largely aspirational.

“The use of chlorine by Da’esh [Isis], and its recruitment of highly trained professionals, including from the West, have revealed far more serious efforts in chemical weapons development.”…

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Anthrax Released: Should we be concerned?

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US Army Dugway Proving Ground Main GateThe abrupt news that live anthrax samples  had been shipped from the U.S. Army Dugway proving ground to laboratories in the U.S., an air base in South Korea and possibly Australia came as a reminder to Americans and the world that biological warfare  training exercises might lead to troubling inadvertent releases. Fortunately, 22 military personnel exposed at the south Korean  airbase are being treated with the antibiotic Cipro. However, this latest release of a BW agent has caused both the U.S. Army bio-warfare directorate and the CDC to review safety precautions, packaging and procedures for the transmission of possible live anthrax spores and why samples had not been made inert?

The BBC reported that the U.S. military has ordered a review of how it handles anthrax after discovering more cases of live samples being accidentally sent to labs:

Live anthrax samples were believed to have been sent to a total of 24 labs, in 11 U.S. states as well as South Korea and Australia, the Pentagon said.

The Pentagon says that there is no known risk to the general public.

Experts in bio-safety have heavily criticized the lapse and called for improved precautions.

Symptoms of anthrax exposure include skin ulcers, nausea, vomiting and fever, and can cause death if untreated.

News of the live shipments first emerged on Wednesday, as the U.S. said it had accidentally shipped live anthrax spores from Utah to labs in Texas, Maryland, Wisconsin, Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, California and Virginia, as well as an air base in South Korea.

Those shipments took place between March 2014 and April 2015, a U.S. official said, according to Reuters.

On Friday, the Department of Defense said it had identified “additional inadvertent live anthrax shipments”, including a suspect sample sent to Australia from a batch of anthrax from 2008.

It is not clear when that sample was shipped to Australia.

The military has ordered all of its labs that have previously received inactive anthrax samples to test them. In addition it is advising all labs to cease working with these samples until told otherwise.

Shortly after 9/11, the American public concern over bio-terrorism was raised  by the release of Anthrax in powdered form in letters sent to members of Congress and randomly to private persons. 22 persons were sickened, 5 died, the U.S. Senate building was shut down and inspected.  Anthrax exists naturally, but more powerful variants have been developed synthetically by dual use laboratories in rogue states like Iran, North Korea and Assad’s Syria.  Bio-warfare laboratories have been established by Al Qaeda and ISIS has been rumored to have obtained access to materials in Syria, as well. Remember the arrest in Afghanistan, prosecution and conviction in the U.S. of Brandeis University and MIT trained scientist, “Lady Al Qaeda”, Aafia Siddiqui .  There is also evidence that Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hezbollah may have been transferred BW capabilities and agents  by Syria that could be deployed against America’s ally , Israel and globally through major transportation nodes in Europe.

Jill Bellamy van Aalst(3)

Dr. Jill Bellamy

We asked Dr. Jill Bellamy, noted expert on biological warfare and threat reduction about this latest incident.  We have published articles by Dr. Bellamy on Syrian, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Iranian BW programs in both the NER and our blog the Iconoclast.

She commented:

Clearly from a bio-safety perspective this is a very serious breach of protocol and demands a full and transparent investigation. As anyone who works with inactivated anthrax would be routinely vaccinated with AVA, exposure from a clinical perspective is probably not as much of a concern as the general public may believe. Of course if anyone outside military labs the live anthrax was sent to and persons who have not been routinely vaccinated were exposed, this would be concerning. I would worry about the time frame from exposure. It appears from the reports that we are talking about several weeks or months during which the anthrax was shipped. It is probably a good sign that none of the labs has reported a laboratory acquired disease or LAD. If exposure is known Cipro (ciprofloxacin hydrochloride) is given for inhalation anthrax and usually a 60 day course is advised. The lab workers in these labs  would surely  have all been vaccinated, so how much of a health risk it poses is debatable.

The bio-safety side is more worrying. CDC and a number of other labs have previously had exposures from the accidental handling of live anthrax. There are very stringent regulations in place for the shipping and transport of live agents. It is doubtful there was any risk to public health during the transport as this would be handled by the military. What is more problematic is that the research done  at US Army labs and Dugway proving ground  are critical to national security.  Incidents like this feed an uninformed section in non-proliferation circles who then call for the closing of these labs or hype the danger they pose to the general public. It makes it more difficult to assure the public that such labs are a vital aspect to protecting citizens from BW attacks and ensuring vaccines and therapeutic countermeasures are available and stockpiled in the event of a deliberate attack. Hopefully this is an incident we will learn a great deal from in terms of bio-safety training, protocols and bio-security.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of  microscopic anthrax spores. Source: Reuters.

Rubio: Obama’s Strategy for the Middle East has Backfired

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In a Washington Post op-ed piece Florida Senator Marco Rubio wrote:

The fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to the Islamic State and recent gains by the group in Syria are the latest signs that President Obama’s strategy to defeat this brutal terrorist group is failing. But the problem is far bigger than that. The president’s entire approach to the Middle East has backfired.

The Middle East is more dangerous and unstable than when Obama came into office — a time when Iraq and Syria were more stable, the Iranian nuclear program was considerably less advanced and the Islamic State did not yet exist.

Much of this instability is a result of Obama’s disengagement from the region, best symbolized by the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. The vacuum created by America’s pullback has been filled by bad actors, including terrorist extremists, both Sunni and Shiite, who have flourished in the absence of U.S. leadership.

On one side are the radical Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and affiliated groups. The Islamic State has capitalized on the political grievances many Iraqi Sunnis have with their sectarian Shiite leaders, as well as the divisions between Syrian Sunnis and the brutal Alawite-dominated Assad regime, which is supported by Iran. The Islamic State’s black banner is now spreading as far afield as Libya and Afghanistan.

On the other side is Iran, a country run by a militant Shiite clerical regime that is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and has as its primary goal regional domination and the export of the Iranian revolution. As the Obama administration has focused on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, Tehran has exploited U.S. weakness and expanded its reach into Syria, Iraq and Yemen, among other countries.

To begin to deal with the challenges we face, we need a reassertion of U.S. leadership in the region and specifically in the fight against the Islamic State.

Keep reading here.

Defeating ISIS: A Biblical View of America’s Role [Part 3]

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PART THREE: 

HIGHLIGHTS OF PART TWO

Part two explained from scripture that God’s love of people and His hatred of evil are inseparable and presented what should be the natural and necessary response of righteous men and women who wish to live in a world of justice, compassion, and order.  Part two also cited studies that identify the large majority of Americans as Christians of some “brand” and who, basically, concur with the moral principles of the bible. Let’s now consider the immediate and necessary role for America to play in quickly stopping the rapidly advancing Nazis of our time (to which millions have people have chanted for 70 years, “Never again!)

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

RESPONDING AS A NATION: THE POWER OF THE ARAB COUNTRIES, THE NEW COALITION OF ARAB NATIONS, AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF AMERICA

On a larger scale, just as ungodly nations were destroyed in the Old Testament, the ungodly “world scale gang-bangers” need to be destroyed.  In Old Testament times, there was one situation in which God specifically told the Israelites not to pray for the enemy: “Do not pray for the well-being of this people” (Jeremiah 14:11).  Similarly, in the New Testament, Jesus did not pray for Satan.  ISIS is not simply the radical arm of Islam that establishes Sharia and devises even more cruelty than is conceived by the policies of these laws (cutting off limbs, executing women who have been raped, etc.).  The mission of ISIS is purely demonic and in this writer’s opinion, the “soldiers” (given: this is an insult to the word “soldier”) of ISIS are either demonically oppressed or possessed.

Because America is ultimately threatened in the not too distant future, we must participate in pushing back the forces of evil.  The evil has spread too far around the world already, and it’s already present here in America (see Parts I and II for more information).  We’ve already seen an Islamic extremist military psychiatrist murder many soldiers at Ft. Hood, many people killed in the Boston marathon, a woman’s head severed while she was at work in a factory in Moore, Oklahoma, and more horrors right here in our homeland.  Whether we like it or not, America is already “in the thick of things.”  The battle exists not only half-way around the world, but in America.

Also, whether it was right or wrong to seek to establish democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, we committed to help the people of these countries live in freedom.  Formerly known as Mesopotamia, Iraq is the very cradle of Christianity (and is now nearly devoid of Christians).  How much more should we now rescue those who suffer the backlash of our abandonment?  Psalm 82:4 says, “Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”  Do you remember when thousands of joyful Iraqi’s proudly held their ink stained thumbs in the air, indicating that they had just voted?  We have left almost all of them to be driven from their homes or to be struck down by the swords of ISIS.

It is way past time for our leaders to map out and enact a clear strategy to defeat our enemies.  We could have stopped ISIS by leaving 15,000 troops in Iraq, but our president chose not to do that (our military leaders advised against this action).  We could have stopped them as they left Syria.  We could have stopped them as they marched from city to city in Iraq.  Iraq isn’t exactly covered with forests and canyons to protect them from our sight.  In Desert Storm, we discovered how easily we destroyed forces of evil with such basic weaponry as A-10 jets (while some people questioned if these planes could be useful at all).  Of course, presently A-10’s are being decommissioned right here in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, where many of our A-10’s are based.

Also, we chose to ensure the downfall of Gaddafi without helping to stabilize Libya, predictably enabling the Muslim Brotherhood to come to power.  In fact, America sent tanks, fighter jets and millions of dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood.

We could have stood our ground when Assad crossed our president’s “line in the sand,” leaving more room for the terrorists to gain ground.  Of course, these and many other examples of non-action have proven the disastrous consequences of America’s continual abdication of world leadership.

Fortunately, people as evil as the ISIS terrorists are “like the chaff which the wind driveth away” (Psalm 1:1).  But it is probable that righteous men and women must do their part in this life before the Lord executes final judgment in the life to come.  Hopefully, the civilized world will unite around strong leadership, which we pray will emerge (and discussed soon).

First to lead the fight was the King of Jordan, and America is giving a billion dollars to Jordan over the next two years.  Even China is giving aid to fight ISIS.  Saudi Arabia has over 200,000 active duty personnel with 75,000 soldiers, the fourth largest military budget in the world (52 billion per year), and has just agreed to take the lead in an Arab coalition to fight ISIS.  This coalition is only in the planning stages and will not be formed in time to save Yemen.  But at least many countries of the Middle East are beginning to clean up their own mess.  Certainly, the Saudis have a more immediate investment in seeing the defeat of ISIS.  Of course, in doing so, they come against Iran, as well, which is a necessary course of action.

The Egyptian Armed forces is reported to have more than 468,500 active personnel, in addition to 800,000 personnel available in reserve and over 400,000 paramilitary personnel making it one of the largest armies in the world (Wikipedia).

Jordan has the fifth most militarized nation in the world with 100,000 active military personnel and nearly 65,000 active reserves.  They will contribute to the coalition.  However, there are internal problems that have kept these countries from working well together.  But if these countries used even half of their forces, ISIS could be destroyed very quickly.

Strong leadership has not yet emerged from the United States.  How strong will be the leadership of Saudi Arabia has yet to be seen.  Of course, God has allowed the present circumstances for a reason, but that does not let America or any nation off the hook from standing up for righteousness against an evil enemy.  Especially an enemy that has designs upon our own nation (indeed, this is its foremost goal).   While the Arabs are forming a coalition, America could act now.  America could immediately provide strong leadership and take much stronger action than it is taking.  Of course, even if victory is quickly achieved, it will take at least a generation to defeat other forms of terrorism around the world, and in this writer’s view, battles against evil will never cease until the return of Christ (see the last chapter of the Book of Revelation).

It’s never too late to take leadership and then turn it over to Arab coalition, should that coalition prove effective.  Keep in mind that the number one responsibility of our government is the security of Americans and that America is presently “in the thick of things” right here on our own soil (see Parts I and II for more details).  Keep in mind that a great threat to America exists at this very moment and the time for decisive action is passing quickly.  Eight miles from the border of Texas is an ISIS training camp.  The State Dept. denies that this is true, but offers no proof of this denial.

Whether you believe we must individually forgive these particular enemies or not is irrelevant to the needed action.  Forgive and love our enemies all you want to, personally.  That’s what Jesus commands.  But our nation must help to stop the senseless murder and rapid advance of darkness, just as the world should have stopped Hitler and could easily have stopped him early in his campaigns.

America must lead the execution of thorough judgment upon ISIS, upon all Islamic terrorists (including upon those that have been released from GITMO and from the jail that released the present leader of ISIS), and upon any other mutation of terrorism that threatens our national security.

Do we need boots on the ground?  We need Arab boots. That’s for certain.   One biblical objection to this suggestion to join with the Arabs is that in biblical times, whenever the armies of Israel joined with ungodly nations, no good came of it.  But these Islamic theocracies are not technically our “enemies.”  As with all the Arab nations, they violate human rights as a way of life, and they persecute women in heinous ways.  Therefore, they are not ideal allies.  Yet considering that these nations are not our enemies and considering how easy it would be for them to defeat ISIS with the right leadership, it seems incumbent upon the United States to provide this leadership.  Such leadership would include providing air power, weaponry and Intel on the ground.  If this leadership proves to be necessary only temporarily, all the better.  Aligning with the Arab nations is no different than aligning with China and Russia to defeat Germany in WWII.  Some people believe that we should withdraw entirely from the Middle East.  We already see how our abdication of leadership has affected Russia, China, and Iran, as well as how this show of apathy and cowardice has affected our allies.  Further or continued abdication would continue to erode the trust of any nation that we can still call an ally.   Also, as already mentioned, whether America likes it or not, we are truly in the middle of the fight right now with terror cells in every state.  As smoke rises in the Middle East, we can provide leadership there – now – or we can exponentially increase our efforts to combat evil in America in the future.

Joining with Iran would be the height foolishness.  That would be the clear equivalent of God’s injunction in the Old Testament to not unite with our enemies.  Yet this is what America seems to be doing!  Iran is the #1 supporter of terror in the world and chants of “death to America” continue to ring in the darkness that covers that land.  Presently, Iran’s Middle East direct influence extends into Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.  Is it any wonder that Arab nations that are friendly to the United States are drawing closer to Israel, hoping that help can come from that nation?  Saudi Arabia has even offered a corridor through their nation for Israel to attack Iran.

Iran would easily defeat ISIS, but it would also add to its territory.  In fact, as America does little, the Shia fighters of Iran are taking the lead.  These Shia militias are quickly eclipsing the Iraqi forces in importance in Iraq.  The result of letting Iran take the lead will likely be to firmly establish Iran as the dominant force in Iran, doubling their territory while on their way to create nuclear weapons in the near future.  Providing help to the Arab nations, primarily in the form of leadership, would press Iran back out of the picture and help to preserve religious liberties in Iraq, helping Iraqis to regain ground lost when American pulled out the 15,000 troops.

Putting his own life in danger, Egypt’s President El Sisi has spoken directly to the leaders of Islam, advocating for them to stand up against Islamic fanaticism and also advocating for Arab boots on the ground.  El Sisi took the stand of a righteous man.

Can America provide air power, Intel on the ground, and weaponry?  Of course.  America could easily take the lead in the battle to defeat ISIS.   Our efforts to merely “contain” ISIS are not working.  Can we airlift those in danger out of Iraq and other nations in order to save them?  We have done this with over a thousand Muslims, as well as with many Syrians, even bringing many of them to America.  With the Syrians that we’ve brought to America, we haven’t even attempted to separate the oppressed from the oppressors.  Why not airlift Christians and those of other faiths out of harm’s way?

Is it worth it to stand up against the darkness?  Here’s another way to ask the same question (biblically): “Is it worth it to live for Jesus, rather than let darkness rule the globe, resulting in the murder of millions of Christians and millions upon millions of people of many faiths and cultures?”  Christians and tens of thousands of people of other faiths are presently being slaughtered.

Pacifism is not advocated in the bible.  Powerful action is not optional.  It’s what defeated the Third Reich and with God’s help – and only with God’s help – it’s what will defeat Islamic terrorism and all forms of terrorism.  I say “only with God’s help” because without God’s favor, Israel was consistently subjugated by other nations.  With God’s favor Israel could not be defeated even by “giants.”  As Psalm 127:1-2 says, “Except the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it.”  America will have victory over any evil only to the extent that the nation turns to God as her strength.  Therefore, from a biblical point of view, God’s believing church in America must call out to Him and pray for the heavens to open in order for God’s power to flow through (2 Chronicles 7:14).  From a biblical point of view, and in the belief of this writer, only through such spiritual warfare will the necessary earthly battle turn in America’s favor.   Keep in mind that as posited in the many scriptures above, love of God goes hand in hand with hatred of evil; and it’s the hatred of evil – this outrage against mass extinction of innocents – that will undergird the passionate pursuit to rid the world of pure evil.  As Bernie Goldberg said recently, “When outrage dies, a piece of humanity dies with it.”   An upsurge of love of God in America, therefore, will greatly help to ignite outrage and necessary action.

While praying for our nation to turn to God, action against the enemies of civilization must be taken quickly.   Of course, believers in Christ know that He will someday go to war against Satan to bring last day’s events to a conclusion.  Until the return of the conquering Messiah, His expectation, I believe, is that Christians and righteous men and women of all faiths will protect their brothers and sisters around the world, as well as in their own countries.  Therefore, fighting Satan in these times agrees with scripture, just as the natural manifestation of righteousness is to hate evil and to love and protect innocent lives.  Leviticus 19:16 says, “Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life.”  How much more should we stand up for the lives of millions of innocents, including the lives of fellow Christians, and including the lives of our own families?  Let’s remember that Jesus was not a peacekeeper; He was a peacemaker.

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