http://www.nationalreview.com/node/386908/print NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
September 3, 2014 4:00 AM
Pulverize the Islamic State
The terror group’s bloodthirsty savagery must be destroyed.
By Deroy Murdock
The time is now for Civilization to pulverize the Islamic State and render it indistinguishable from the sands from which it crawled. These primitive, bloodthirsty savages combine the genocidal zeal of the Khmer Rouge with the transnational appeal of militant Islam. Like Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, these terrorists machine gun those they hate and then pack ditches with their cadavers. Like Robespierre, they have an insatiable thirst for beheading. And like Tiberius, they dangle Christians — among others — from crosses. The Islamic State literally has resurrected crucifixion.
All of this would be hideous enough if this group had the good manners to limit its barbarism to Iraq and Syria. While exterminating these butchers would remain crucial for human rights and global stability, a strictly Middle Eastern Islamic State would not necessarily threaten the U.S. homeland. Alas, this rump regime has America and its allies in its cross hairs.
“Come O Muslims to your honor, to your victory,” states the group’s June 29 declaration of an Islamic caliphate. “By Allah, if you disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and creed, then by Allah, you will own the Earth, and the east and west will submit to you.”
Reuters reports that the Islamic State produced a video last month titled “Breaking the American Cross — Soon.” It predicts that the “Islamic State defeated USA.”
An English-speaking Islamic State terrorist said in an August 7 video: “God willing, we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.” Two days later, these renegades released a photo of someone holding up a smart phone on Pennsylvania Avenue, just outside the Executive Mansion. Its screen showed the Islamic State flag. Above it, the caption read:
A message from ISIS to US
We are in your state
We are in your cities
We are in your streets
You are our goals anywhere
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was in U.S. custody in Iraq for four years, until his 2009 discharge. Before walking away to return to jihad, this terror master’s last comment to American soldiers was: “See you in New York.”
It would be comforting to dismiss all of this as mere bluster. Alas, intelligence officials in Washington believe some 300 Americans with U.S. passports are fighting for the Islamic State today. (Its members Douglas McAuthur McCain of San Diego — a.k.a. Duale Khalid, his Muslim name — and Abdirahmaan Muhumed of Minneapolis were killed last week, while battling the Free Syrian Army.) So are hundreds, if not thousands, of westerners with European passports. At any point, these vicious, combat-fortified, Islamic-extremist killers can lay down their weapons and drive to Amman, Beirut, or Istanbul. They can fly from such cities, switch jets in Athens, Frankfurt, or London; and land — without visas — in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. Then the excitement would begin.
“If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month,” Saudi King Abdullah warned last week. “Terrorism knows no border, and its danger could affect several countries outside the Middle East,” he said. The Saudi monarch added: “You see how the jihadists carry out beheadings and make children show the severed heads in the street.” He told a group of foreign ambassadors, including U.S. envoy Joseph Westphal, “I ask you to transmit this message to your leaders: ‘Fight terrorism with force, reason, and speed.’”
Message not received.
“There’s no timetable for solving these problems that’s going to meet the cable news cycle speed,” senior White House aide Dan Pfeifer told the Washington Post.
So, what’s the rush?
Like Pfeifer, Obama blames these perils on his TV set. And don’t forget Twitter and Facebook.
“If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart,” Obama said Friday. “The world’s always been messy,” he observed. “We’re just noticing now in part because of social media.”
Obama made these remarks on August 29, the day after he offered these unsettling words while wearing an elegant and thoroughly appropriate summer suit:
I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet. I think what I’ve seen in some of the news reports suggests that folks are getting a little further ahead of where we’re at than we currently are . . . But there’s no point in me asking for action on the part of Congress before I know exactly what it is that is going to be required for us to get the job done.
Rather than hunkering down with his national-security team at, say, Camp David to develop an anti–Islamic State strategy, Obama essentially blamed Mark Zuckerberg for the planet’s most dangerous problems. Obama’s venue? Where else? A Democrat fundraiser at the Purchase, N.Y., home of Robert Wolf. According to The Hill, Wolf is “an occasional Obama golf partner and former president of UBS Investment Bank.” Some 250 rich people attended. Cost: $15,000 per couple. Wolf hosted the second of three separate fundraisers at which Obama appeared last Friday.
Obama is disturbingly relaxed about this crisis despite the Islamic State’s beheading of American journalist James Foley. While vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard on August 20, Obama made a statement lamenting Foley’s murder. Eight minutes later, he notoriously commenced his 190th round of golf as president. (And as this article was being edited, these sewer rats struck yet again. Word arrived Tuesday afternoon that the Islamic State decapitated American journalist Steven Joel Sotloff.)
If Obama would give his putter and tin cup a rest, he just might find time to craft a strategy for the U.S. and its allies to supply the Kurdish military with the arms, intelligence, air support, and ground advisers it needs to encircle and demolish these stone-age maniacs within Iraq.
The Islamic State, of course, controls much of Syria, clear to the Turkish border. Here, too, America must support and collaborate with rational Syrian ground forces. The Free Syrian Army comes to mind.
As these efforts advance, the U.S. immediately should begin to destroy this organization’s administrative headquarters, army strongholds, training bases, vehicle depots, air fields, and other infrastructure within Syria — as well as Iraq — via drones, bombers, fighter jets, and other military assets. Syrian president Bashar Assad may complain from his bunker in Damascus. Let him try to stop us.
If Islamic State members with American and western passports get blasted to bits in these strikes, that will save U.S. officials the trouble of stopping them at JFK, ORD, SFO, or the Mexican or Canadian frontiers. On the latter point, Judicial Watch recently warned of this outfit’s ambitions to penetrate America’s southern border.
“Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs,” Judicial Watch reported last Friday. “High-level federal law enforcement, intelligence, and other sources have confirmed to Judicial Watch that a warning bulletin for an imminent terrorist attack on the border has been issued,” the Washington-based legal-watchdog group added. “Specifically, the government sources reveal that the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is confirmed to now be operating in Juarez, a famously crime-infested narcotics hotbed situated across from El Paso, Texas.”
FoxNews.com obtained an August 28 Texas Department of Public Safety “situational awareness” bulletin titled “ISIS Interest on the US Southwest Border.” According to this document, “A review of ISIS social-media messaging during the week ending August 26 shows that militants are expressing an increased interest in the notion that they could clandestinely infiltrate the southwest border of U.S., for terror attack.”
Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe of Project Veritas recently demonstrated how easily such hostile incursions could be perpetrated. Wearing an Arabic gown, camouflage military jacket, and Osama bin Laden mask, O’Keefe waded comfortably across the Rio Grande, from Guadalupe, Mexico into Hudspeth County, Texas. Not even one Border Patrol agent slowed, confronted, or even welcomed O’Keefe/bin Laden to America.
The United States swiftly should relegate the Islamic State to the history books, lest those same volumes instead record the homicides of Americans at the hands of U.S.-born jihadists deployed here by these monsters to commit mass murder.
Drone-based projectiles, air-to-ground missiles, 500-pound bombs. All the ordnance necessary to annihilate each of the Islamic State’s walking, talking cancer cells should be cascading from the heavens.
As Eric Clapton once sang: “Let it rain.”
