ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (30 page)

The West’s frequently condescending treatment of Israel—the only free, Western-style democracy in the Middle East and a standard-bearer for Judeo-Christian civilization in a sea of Muslim tyranny—is shortsighted and self-defeating. For years, Israel has literally been on the front lines of the struggle against the very same jihadists who have declared war against the United States and Europe. Islamic terror attacks like the ones in Paris, Ottawa, and Boston that have caused so much consternation in the West in recent years are a regular occurrence in Israel, where Palestinian terrorists practically invented the kind of “chip away,” lone wolf jihadi assaults discussed in
chapter three
.

Americans and Europeans may be stunned by this jihadist barbarism, but Israel, sadly, has grown quite used to it and knows exactly how to deal with it—not with rosy “Islam is peace” platitudes and half measures but with force and steely resolve. Here’s just a small sampling of what the state of Israel was experiencing at the same time that ISIS was surging across the Middle East and leaving a trail of severed heads in its wake during 2014:

          
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On June 12, 2014, Hamas operatives kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers—including sixteen-year-old Naftali Fraenkel, a U.S. citizen. The killings helped trigger the third war between Israel and Hamas in a five-year span. As we have seen, “Operation Protective Edge” was the Israeli campaign designed to stop Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket barrages against Israeli civilian centers and to neutralize a vast network of underground “terror tunnels” that Hamas had dug from Gaza into Israeli territory, some of which were reportedly designed to carry out mass terror attacks against civilians in southern Israel.
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On August 4, in Jerusalem, a Palestinian man driving a tractor ran over and killed one Israeli pedestrian and injured several more before crashing into a public bus and overturning it. The terrorist was shot and killed by Israeli police.
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On October 22, a Palestinian in a car careened into a Jerusalem Light Rail station, killing two people—including a three-month-old Israeli girl with dual American citizenship—and injuring several more before being shot and killed by Israeli police.
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On October 29, in an assassination attempt in Jerusalem, a Palestinian man shot and critically wounded Rabbi Yehuda Glick, an activist who advocates for Jews to be able to pray on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism—which is now the site of the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the site from which Muslims believe Mohammed ascended to heaven on his Night Journey.
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They believe this despite the fact that Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran (while it is mentioned literally hundreds of times in the Bible).

          
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On November 5, in Jerusalem, a Hamas operative plowed a van into a group of Israeli Border Patrol forces and pedestrians, killing one person and injuring at least fourteen more. He was shot and killed by police, but not before exiting the van and attempting to attack more pedestrians with a metal rod.
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On November 10, a twenty-six-year-old woman waiting at a bus stop was run over and then stabbed to death by a Palestinian man in Gush Etzion, in Judea.
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On November 18, two Palestinian men stormed into a Jerusalem synagogue and used a meat cleaver and a gun to murder five worshipers, including three dual U.S.-Israeli citizens, before being shot and killed by Israeli police.
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Israel has been suffering through these types of atrocities on a regular basis for
decades,
often at the hands of Hamas. Like ISIS, Hamas is a ruthless terrorist organization that revels in the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children. And although Hamas is focused, first and foremost, on wiping Israel off the map, it shares ISIS’s goal of a global Islamic caliphate. Also like ISIS, Hamas is an avowed enemy of the United States and has murdered American citizens.
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The fact is, Israel’s enemies are the West’s enemies—we face common foes.

Indeed, Israel is the prime target not just of Palestinian terrorist groups. It is also squarely in the crosshairs of ISIS and al Qaeda, the same global jihadist organizations that are devoted to America’s destruction.

          
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As we saw in
chapter two
, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a jihadi group based in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, along Israel’s southern border, has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and has a history of carrying out cross-border attacks against Israel.

          
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ISIS sympathizers are also active to Israel’s north, in Lebanon, and to Israel’s south, in Gaza—where some Palestinians are reportedly leaving Hamas to join what they view as the more extreme Islamic State.
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In December 2014, three local jihadist groups based in southern Syria reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS, meaning that “For the first time since the Syrian civil war began in early 2011, Islamic State . . . has gained a presence near the border with Israel on the Golan Heights.”
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Likewise, the al-Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, also controls territory along the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, on the Israeli border.
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Israel also faces a growing number of ISIS sympathizers within its borders. In November 2014, Israeli authorities arrested three members of an ISIS-linked terror cell operating in the city of Hebron in Judea.
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Israeli security services believe that over thirty Israeli Arabs have left the country to join ISIS.
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From ISIS to al Qaeda to Hamas to Hezbollah, tiny Israel is encircled by terrorist groups encamped on its borders and committed to its destruction. As we have seen, these existential enemies of Israel are also America’s enemies, not to mention Europe’s. You’d think that obvious fact—along with our shared Judeo-Christian heritage and democratic ideals—would be more than enough reason for Western governments to express solidarity with the Jewish State. Yet on November 18, 2014, just hours after the deadly attack by two Palestinian terrorists on worshipers in a Jerusalem synagogue, lawmakers in Spain’s lower parliament voted overwhelmingly to recognize a Palestinian state—despite the Palestinians having proven again and again, through numberless acts of terror and incitement, that they are far from ready for, or
deserving of, statehood.
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Nevertheless, in a sign of naked antagonism toward Israel, the European Parliament and national legislatures in Britain, Ireland, France, and Sweden have joined Spain in recognizing the state of “Palestine.”
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As for the Obama administration, it has at times shown the Israelis open hostility, culminating in December 2014 with reports that it was even considering sanctions against Israel for continuing to build homes in Jerusalem (in areas of the city that the White House believes should be part of a future Palestinian state).
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Ordering Israelis not to build homes in Jerusalem—considered by the Jewish people to be their eternal capital for the past three thousand years—is like forbidding Americans from buying property in New York City or Washington, D.C.

But for the Obama administration, when something goes wrong in the Middle East—which is often, particularly since President Obama took office—it’s invariably somehow Israel’s fault. Incredibly, the administration has even found a way to blame Israel for the rise of ISIS. At a White House ceremony marking the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha in October 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that the lack of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians was helping to fuel ISIS recruitment. “As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about [building a coalition against ISIS],” Kerry said, “. . . there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt they had to respond to.”
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In other words, America’s top diplomat believes thousands of jihadists from around the world are flocking to Syria and Iraq and chopping off the heads of Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds partly because they’re angry that there is no Palestinian state.

Kerry is far from the only administration official wallowing in ignorance when it comes to the ISIS threat. On June 29, 2011, CIA Director John Brennan—who at the time was a senior adviser to President Obama—declared,
“Our strategy is . . . shaped by a deeper understanding of al Qaeda’s goals, strategy, and tactics. I’m not talking about al Qaeda’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate.
That vision is absurd, and we are not going to organize our counterterrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen.
We are not going to elevate these thugs and their murderous aspirations into something larger than they are [emphasis added].”
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Except that al Qaeda’s vision of a caliphate
did
happen. And ironically enough, as terrorism expert Thomas Joscelyn pointed out in the
Weekly Standard,
it all came to fruition on June 29, 2014—exactly “three years later to the day” after Brennan had said the revival of the caliphate was an “absurd” pipe dream.

Major General Michael K. Nagata, who commands U.S. Special Operations forces in the Middle East, convened a diverse panel of experts over the summer of 2014 to try to understand what makes ISIS so successful. His concern: “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it. We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”
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Nagata’s admission was stunning. We’re a full fourteen years from the 9/11 attacks, yet Nagata and other leaders and decision makers in the United States still don’t understand “the idea” behind the Islamic State? A major reason for this lack of understanding is a knee-jerk refusal to acknowledge any connection between Islamic terror and Islam. President Obama leads the way (for once) in this regard with his repeated declarations that ISIS is “not Islamic.” But he is far from alone on the political left. After Islamic terrorists with links to al Qaeda and ISIS slaughtered seventeen people in separate incidents over three days in France in January 2015, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean appeared on MSNBC (a fitting venue) and declared, “I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says. . . . I think
ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult.”
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Thus sayeth Howard Dean, professor of Islamic Studies and Koranic expert (not). This is a man whose religious knowledge is so profound that he once said his favorite book in the New Testament was the Book of Job. (Only, the Book of Job is found in the Old Testament.)
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In completely disassociating acts of Islamic terrorism from Islamic teachings, Dean, President Obama, and their far left, progressive ilk not only violate the first rule of war—know your enemy—they take things a dangerous step further by refusing even to identify who the enemy is. For example, in the wake of the jihadist attacks in Paris, President Obama announced plans to hold a “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” in February 2015. The title of the event perfectly encapsulates the West’s head-in-the-sand approach to the problem. “Violent extremists” have not declared war on the United States—Islamic jihadists have. Being able to admit that fact is a start. Getting around to educating the American people about the jihadist threat and preparing them for a difficult struggle against it would be the next step, because if you don’t understand your enemy—its strengths, weaknesses, and ideology—you cannot defeat it. Uniting the American people and laying out a clear strategy to defeat jihadism would follow. It’s called leadership. Unfortunately, that’s a quality currently in very short supply in Washington, D.C.

On January 11, 2014, over forty world leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, gathered in Paris to join French President Francois Hollande and well over one million French citizens (seven million including other locations nationwide) in a massive solidarity march against Islamic terrorism.
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Yet the man who is supposed to be the Leader of the Free World was conspicuous by his absence. President Obama not only skipped the Paris rally—he didn’t even bother to send a top administration official such as Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry to represent the
United States (Attorney General Eric Holder was actually in Paris during the event yet did not attend).
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Sending a high-level American official to the march would have been a forceful statement by the president that America fully realizes that the West is locked in a generational struggle against the rapidly growing threat of radical Islam—and a declaration that the most powerful country in the world will stand together in solidarity with its allies to defeat the jihadist enemy, no matter the cost. Instead, President Obama and his cabinet were glaringly, embarrassingly MIA. It’s not hard to figure out why.