ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (29 page)

          
In Britain, peaceful protests against the violence have been marred by vile placards including one declaring: “Hitler you were right!”

                
At a Central London march, protesters confronted a Jewish woman with her two young children and told them: “Burn in hell.” . . .

                
Activists and supporters of the Palestinian cause gathered outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, west London, before marching towards Parliament Square.

                
Carrying Palestinian flags and placards with slogans such as Stop the Killing and Free Palestine, the protesters chanted “Israel is a terror state”, “Gaza don’t you cry, we will never let you die” and “Allahu Akbar” (god is great).
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Over one hundred hate crimes were committed against Jews in Great Britain in July 2014, more than double the usual number.
⁵⁹

A modern-day pogrom broke out in the “Little Jerusalem” section of Paris on July 27, 2014. Protestors chanted, “Gas the Jews” and “Kill the
Jews” while attacking Jewish-owned businesses and torching cars.
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Similarly, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, a “400-strong mob” firebombed a synagogue and “smashed and looted” kosher stores. Chants of “Death to the Jews” and “Slit Jews’ throats” filled the air, and similar murderous epithets adorned banners waved by members of the mob.
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This type of Kristallnacht-like violence exploded across France, with no less than eight synagogues attacked throughout the country in the span of one week in July 2014.
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France currently has Europe’s largest Jewish population, at an estimated five hundred thousand. But Jews are now leaving France in droves thanks to rampant Muslim-driven anti-Semitism, with many making their way to Israel.
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You’d think that Germany, the country where Kristallnacht and the Holocaust were perpetrated not so long ago, would be especially vigilant in guarding against open displays of anti-Semitism. Yet during a series of large pro-Palestinian protests across Germany in July 2014, Israelis were compared to Nazis and Operation Protective Edge to the Holocaust. That was some of the tamer rhetoric. At one rally in Berlin, Muslim protestors pumped their fists in the air and chanted, “Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight on your own!” Cries of “Hamas Hamas Jews to the gas!” were heard at demonstrations in Dortmund and Frankfurt, and one Berlin imam called on Allah to “destroy the Zionist Jews. . . . Count them and kill them, to the very last one.”
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These Hitler-esque outbursts set off alarm bells in Germany’s Jewish community. Dieter Graumann, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, told the
Guardian,
“These are the worst times [for Germany’s Jews] since the Nazi era.”
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European Muslims were the most sizable and vocal group at all of the above-mentioned anti-Semitic hatefests—including, no doubt, a high percentage of ISIS sympathizers. Anyone who watched the mass continent-wide rallies had to realize that Islam was in Europe to stay—and not a moderate, rational, Westernized Islam. No, this was radical Islamism: raw, unadulterated, and in-your-face. The recent emergence of ISIS has only
intensified this troubling trend, which had been percolating in Europe for years.

In early 2009, as an earlier round of violent anti-Israel protests erupted in Europe during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (an operation meant to—you guessed it—stop sustained barrages of Hamas rocket fire at Israeli civilian centers), I interviewed Cliff May, a former
New York Times
correspondent who is now president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

“It’s unclear whether there is a future for Jews in Europe—I would go that far,” May told me. “But it’s unclear whether there is a future for Europeans in Europe as well.”

The future is looking quite bright, however, for ISIS and its radical adherents, who are multiplying daily across Europe.

CHAPTER EIGHT

AMERICA FIDDLES AND THE WORLD BURNS

“FROM HERE, THEY COULD HIT BEN GURION AIRPORT.”

I was standing on the mountains of Samaria—an area of Israel that the Obama administration and most of the world calls “the West Bank”—with an Israeli local who wanted to show me their strategic importance. It was early December 2012 and “Operation Pillar of Defense,” a week-long Israeli military action against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, had just recently ended. The “international community” had a solution it was touting to prevent another round of hostilities—the same one it has been demanding for decades. Israel must hand over Samaria and the neighboring area of Judea to the Palestinians. And it must do so immediately.

“You can see Tel Aviv right there in the distance,” said my Israeli guide as he motioned with his hand. “And of course, Ben Gurion Airport is there. If we hand Judea and Samaria over to the Palestinians, Hamas will move in. And instead of shooting rockets at Israel from Gaza, which is flat, they’ll be able to move their rockets onto these mountains and have a perfect view
of Israel below. Tel Aviv—and Ben Gurion—will then be hit with a barrage of rockets. There is no doubt.”

Tel Aviv, Israel’s second-largest city, with over four hundred thousand residents, lies on the coastal plain where some 70 percent of the total Israeli population is situated. Ben Gurion International, which is located in Tel Aviv, is Israel’s lone commercial airport. Targeting Tel Aviv and forcing a shutdown of Ben Gurion Airport for any extended period of time would cripple the Israeli economy and ruin the country’s vital tourism industry.

Hamas is already rapidly approaching the ability to do just that from its Gaza stronghold. During its summer 2014 war against Israel, the terror group fired long-range rockets out of Gaza that reached deep into Israeli territory, well beyond Tel Aviv. When one of the rockets fell a mile away from Ben Gurion Airport on July 22, 2014, the Obama administration and some European countries temporarily canceled commercial flights to Israel, citing safety concerns. Israeli government officials were furious—some called the flight bans a victory for terror. And they were right. Hamas and other regional terror groups now realized that firing rockets that fall even a full mile away from Ben Gurion Airport is enough to make Western governments essentially abandon Israel in its time of need. Talk about psychological jihad.

The flight ban decision was particularly inexplicable given that Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system had shot down about 90 percent of all the rockets Hamas had fired at civilian and strategic areas during the conflict.
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And in any case, the Obama administration had never enacted a total ban on commercial flights—as it did with Israel—when it came to the airspace above hotspots such as North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan (the scene of attempted terrorist attacks on commercial airports in the months leading up to the Israel-Hamas war), Ukraine (where pro-Russian separatists shot a commercial flight out of the sky the
very same month
as the Israel flight ban), and Iraq. Warnings, yes—but not total bans. According to retired Naval Intelligence officer J. E. Dyer, “The prohibition on Ben Gurion is uniquely stringent, and inconsistent with FAA [Federal Aviation
Administration] practices elsewhere. It also had to be approved by Obama. Israel is an ally, one of America’s closest partners in the world. Cutting off her commercial airport from U.S. carriers is inherently a presidential-level decision, and Obama is responsible whether he made it or not.”
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So why would President Obama, who doggedly refused to ban commercial flights into the U.S. from Ebola-affected countries in Africa, approve the FAA’s decision on Israel and defend it as “prudent”?
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Could it have been retaliation for Israel’s defiance of the Obama administration’s demands that it reach a ceasefire with Hamas—the same Hamas that had already broken repeated ceasefires during the conflict and continued to fire rocket after rocket at Israeli population centers and kill Israeli soldiers? Was the Obama administration’s move, as Republican Senator Ted Cruz suggested, tantamount to an “economic boycott” and a not-so-subtle message to Israel to fall in line and get with the Obama foreign policy program, which includes the establishment of a Palestinian state?
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Cruz, who threatened to block all State Department appointees until he got answers regarding the Israel flight ban, also pointed out that the Obama administration had recently rewarded the Palestinians with a $47 million aid package—aid, he said, that was “in effect $47 million for Hamas.”
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Rest assured that Hamas and other jihadists heard the administration’s message loud and clear: America punishes its friends and rewards its foes. As a result, the enemies of Israel—and America—were emboldened yet again.

Israel also undoubtedly got the memo—and the delicious irony is that the Obama administration’s flight ban made the Palestinian state that Obama, Europe, and the UN are demanding even less likely. After all, if one rocket out of Gaza that fell a mile from Ben Gurion International Airport can cause a commercial flight ban and harm the Israeli economy, what would thousands of rockets fired by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups from the high ground of Judea and Samaria do? Israel, which is roughly the size of New Jersey, has seen the disastrous effects of past withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza in the form of thousands
of rockets rained down upon its cities by Hezbollah and Hamas, respectively. Needless to say, a new Palestinian terror state on the so-called West Bank is not a very appealing option.

Why would Israel hand over these strategically vital mountain areas to a Palestinian people (including Mahmoud Abbas’s supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority, a hotbed of anti-Semitic, pro-terror incitement) that have shown no inclination toward peace and refuse even to recognize Israel’s right to exist? Should not Jews have a right to live in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, of all places, regions mentioned throughout the Old and New Testaments, where the Jewish patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived—and where King David ruled (from Hebron, in Judea) before moving his capital to Jerusalem three thousand years ago? The three hundred fifty thousand–plus Jews currently living in Judea and Samaria are called “illegal settlers”—and yet their ancestors settled those same lands thousands of years ago.