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ISIS – Live With It

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President Obama’s attempt to minimize the threat posed by the Islamic State begins with his reluctance to identify the enemy by its name, “Islamic Caliphate.” Instead he calls it ISIL.

Since according to him and many other politically adjusted Western leaders and most other Muslims, Islam is a religion of Peace, Obama refuses to identify the Islamic Caliphate’s violent jihadi ideology as Islamist. Instead, he talks about an indiscernible “violent extremism.” In addition, he refuses to admit that the Islamic Caliphate is no longer a terrorist group but a state with a territory three times larger than the size of New Jersey. It is ruled by the strictest Islamic law (Sharia), has its own currency, administration, lots of weapons and fighters from all over the world, and highly effective media outlets.
Unfortunately,  the U.S. president is not alone. European and other Western allies and Arab countries in the Middle East also refuse to face reality. Instead, they also deny the Islamic Caliphate’s jihadist nature and like Obama, call for “better ideas,” for an “alternative ideology to “violent extremism.”
The Islamic Caliphate, like Nazi Germany and fascist Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, uses ideology, propaganda and military power to expand its reach. It must be defeated militarily in order to debunk its “violent extremist” jihadist ideology, which due to its successes is spreading faster than a wild fire

Richard Barrett, a former head of counterterrorism at Britain’s MI6, who also served for nine years as the co-ordinator of the UN’s Al-Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team (2004-2013), in an article in the Independent UK claims we cannot destroy ISIS. Instead, he argues incredibly that in fact ISIS brings order and justice and that it is our fault that so many young people (he doesn’t say Muslims) are eager to join it. “Isis projects a strong identity and sense of purpose and it appeals in particular to people who lack both; it offers them the opportunity to be part of something new, regardless of their gender or abilities…The policy challenge is therefore not to seek the destruction of the caliphate so much as to promote its transformation into something that the Syrian and Iraqi people, along with the rest of us, could live with.”

He goes on to lament, as Obama often does, that “It is a sad comment on our own society that a limited but significant number of young people – and most recruits to ISIS are in their late teens to late twenties – cannot readily identify a better outlet for their energies and aspirations at home.”

From someone of Barrett’s stature, this is astonishingly naïve. ISIS rule is totalitarian in the extreme. The notion that ISIS rule is just and justice is “more evenly applied” is ridiculous. If an ISIS-conquered part of Syria or Iraq appears to be stable and quiet, it is the due to a degree of oppression that the Gestapo and East German Stasi would have envied.

Barrett thinks the West will be able to dissuade ISIS from using “violent extremism” in its striving to establish the global Islamic Caliphate. But not everyone agrees. At the Pentagon on Monday, French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian said that ISIS is no longer a terrorist group. Although it uses terrorism as a tactic, it is not really a terrorist organization at all. In his view, ISIS is, by now, a pseudo-state led by a conventional army, and should be treated and defeated as such.

He is right. This, however, contradicts Obama’s vision of a new world that accommodates everyone on an equal footing, one where everyone must deal with one another via “mutual interests” and “mutual respect.” Politics, religion, history are irrelevant in this ideological challenge to “violent extremism.”

However, defeating the Islamic Caliphate’s military forces is the “better idea” Obama is looking for. And liberating the territories it has captured and brutalized would help defeat its ideological claims and diminish its appeal to large numbers of Muslims.

Unless the Islamic Caliphate is obliterated soon, Western civilization and the historical monuments that document its development will be destroyed and the West will be faced by growing Islamist violence.