Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
On Friday morning, Obama claimed that ISIS had been contained. By Friday evening, ISIS had carried out one of the deadliest acts of Islamic terrorism in the West. 129 are dead. 352 are wounded.
The Jihadists massacred helpless people, shooting them down as they begged for mercy in restaurants and music halls, blowing themselves up for Allah outside soccer stadiums. Shouting, “Allahu Akbar”, they brought the terror and horror of the Islamic State from grim Raqqa to prosperous Paris.
Obama had claimed that the Islamic State was contained in Iraq and Syria, but the Caliphate was never going to be contained by his tactics of “low-intensity, occasional strikes” in which 75 percent of pilots return without bombing ISIS even when they have the terror group right in their sights.
It’s a familiar story. A few hours before 9⁄11, Bill Clinton told an Australian audience that he could have killed Bin Laden, “but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan”. And according to Bill, if he had done that, “I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”
Bill Clinton kept his virtue and the terrorist leader whose life he spared killed thousands of Americans.
If we don’t hit the terrorists where they live, they will kill us where we live. That is the lesson of 9⁄11. It’s the lesson of the latest Paris attacks. It’s the lesson of every Islamic terrorist attack.
We can bomb them in Iraq and Syria, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or we can be murdered by them in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and London.
Obama officials said that they didn’t want to hit ISIS with “shock-and-awe” style bombings. If they had done that, the Paris attacks might not have happened.
Had ISIS been hit hard, some of the fighters who made their way to France might have been killed. Or they might have been needed back in Syria and Iraq. Or they might have abandoned ship once the Caliphate failed and the Islamic State’s pretenses of theological supremacy were exposed by its collapse.
Instead of fighting ISIS, Obama has faked a fight, concentrating on drone strikes and hashtags, and doctoring intelligence to make it look like these tactics are working.
They clearly are not working. The same tactics that have failed to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not going to beat their Islamic State big brother which, despite all the denials, has become a state.
France’s left-wing president called the attacks an “act of war”, accused the terrorists of “barbarism” and vowed to be” ruthless” in fighting them. By contrast, Obama offered the same old condolences, but said that he didn’t want to “speculate” about the attackers. That’s his usual line after an Islamic terror attack.
We’re not going to defeat ISIS with hashtags. We’re not going to defeat it by calling it Daesh. We are not going to defeat it by taking out one of its leaders every few months.
We can only defeat the Caliphate by destroying it.
Obama had told the Pentagon that we can’t defeat ISIS with guns. But ISIS had no problem massacring almost a hundred people in Paris with guns. We don’t need “better ideas”, as Obama suggested, to beat ISIS. Our civilization is already a better idea. It just needs defending from the barbarians at the gates.
While the President of France talks war, Obama has sought to define the conflict down from war to terrorism to criminal misconduct. Even while Obama tosses a few warm words on cold corpses in Paris, he is plotting to free the last of the Al Qaeda terrorists captured at great pain and risk by our soldiers.
The Caliph of the Islamic State’s parting words on being freed from a U.S. detention camp in Iraq were, “I’ll see you guys in New York.”
How long until Caliph Baghdadi keeps his word and the massacres in Paris come to New York? How long until the batches of murderous terrorists freed by Obama come to kill Americans on American soil?
Muslim terrorism is not a criminal problem. It is not a sign of frustration and discontent. It’s not a reaction to our foreign policy. It’s a civilizational strategy of expansion through genocide.
It’s not a debate. It’s a war. We can either win that war or lose that war. It’s up to us.
As long as international travel exists, the war will not be limited by geography. A Caliph or Emir in another part of the world doesn’t need to raise a fleet to invade Europe. He can just spring for a few fake passports or let some of the local boys in France do the dirty work.
What happens in Afghanistan, won’t stay in Afghanistan. What happens in Syria, won’t stay in Syria.
The free world needs a Caliphate Doctrine. It must state clearly and unambiguously that any attempt to build a Caliphate, to subjugate territories to Islamic law with all its accompanying barbarism, and to demand the surrender of the rest of humanity through terror, will be met with utter destruction.
Not drone strikes. Not hashtags. Not calls for moderate Islam. Not even the “shock-and-awe” that Obama officials nervously disavowed. But the destruction that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan faced after they attempted to impose the rule of a master race and ideology on the world through terror.
If we do not want another century of war, then we must make the Islamic State into an example.
The Islamic State seeks to horrify and terrify us into surrender. Its atrocities are techniques for destroying our morale and teaching us helplessness. If we do not fight back, then we will eventually give up. Entire European countries have already surrendered and ask only for a merciful conquest.
When Napoleon faced Muslim fighters who violated the rules of war in Israel, he had them put to death. “To have acted otherwise than as I did, would probably have caused the destruction of my whole army,” he explained. It is not an army that faces destruction today, not even a nation, but all of civilization.
The Caliphate Doctrine would make it clear that civilization has no room for the Islamic State, that it has no room for terrorism, sex slavery, child soldiers, beheadings and the other horrors of Supremacist Islam. It makes it plain that Islamic terrorism is not a domestic criminal problem, but an act of war against civilization by a death cult. And we have a choice between our deaths and that of the cult.
A Caliphate, whether that of ISIS or any other, represents the murder and enslavement of mankind. Each Islamic terror attack is carried out in support of a Caliphate of the present or the future. By taking a definitive stand against any Caliphate, we make it clear that the modern world has no room for such an institution and that Islamic terrorism, domestic or international, is fighting for a lost cause.
We can begin by destroying the Caliphate. And when the Islamic State falls, then the dreams of all our murderers, from Paris to New York, from Raqqa to Istanbul, will begin to die with it.
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