by Daniel Greenfield
In August 2012, James Foley retweeted a link to a CNN story asking “Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda?”
The article concluded that indeed it was.
Three months later, Foley had been kidnapped. Two years later, on another August, a former branch of Al Qaeda chopped off his head.
In a New Yorker interview this year, which seemed to focus on the Lakers more than anything else, Obama wrote off ISIS as what happens when a “jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms”. He suggested that the answer lay in training the Iraqi police forces better.
That same month, ISIS had declared an Islamic State in Fallujah, the event that Obama was dismissively reacting to, and extended its reach beyond Iraq and Syria into Lebanon and Turkey. By June, the steamroller advance across Iraq had begun destroying the Iraqi military, never mind its police forces.
In April, Peter Bergen, the original author of the CNN article, had another piece contending that “right wing extremists” were now even “more deadly than Jihadists.” On August 18, he produced a CNN piece claiming that ISIS was no threat to Americans.
On the next day, ISIS chopped off James Foley’s head.
The incredibly deadly right-wing extremists have yet to show off the severed head of a journalist.
Obama has now been forced to hit ISIS with air strikes and to even put men on the ground while denying that the United States was at war with ISIS or that ISIS had anything to do with Islam.
And it was that denial which is at the root of the problem.
The official line was that there were two flavors of Al Qaeda; a transnational terrorist organization that had been defeated and local terrorist groups with no international ambitions. We didn’t have to worry about the junior varsity Jihadis of ISIS because they only wanted a little Lebensraum in Iraq and Syria.
It’s still the line being pushed by the White House spokesman even as American planes are bombing the JV Jihadis in Iraq after the junior team mixed a little genocide into their warm up routine.
But no one had bothered to inform ISIS that it wasn’t supposed to think big. When the Delta Force tried to rescue Foley back in July, the ISIS compound they raided had been named “Bin Laden”.
Obama’s foreign policy depended on these distinctions between “Good Jihadis”and “Bad Jihadis”, “International Jihadis” and “Locally Grown Jihadis” when there really is just one Jihad.
The Free Syrian Army that Foley reported on was composed of Jihadis, some of whom collaborated openly or covertly with the Al Nusra Front, another Al Qaeda in Iraq splinter group that has since pledged allegiance to ISIS. The Jihadis we were supporting were also supporting ISIS.
The Jihad doesn’t recognize national boundaries. ISIS set out to eliminate borders. It has struck out at any country within its reach and announced a five year plan to take over the Middle East and Africa.
It has a local name, but its ambition is limitless.
Back in 2012, CNN reported that U.S. intelligence believed that members of Al Qaeda in Iraq had taken part in the Benghazi attack. The myth of the provincial JV Jihadi who couldn’t be bothered to poke his head out of Iraq had about as much credibility as blaming the Benghazi attack on a YouTube video.
By the time that the Iraqi and Syrian Jihad was swarming with foreign fighters it should have been clear even to Obama that they weren’t a local phenomenon, but a transnational one.
Islam is not a religion of national boundaries. If it were, the territory of Islam would be limited to the general vicinity of what is today Saudi Arabia. The difference between local and transnational Islamic terrorist groups lies in capability, not ideology. Every Islamic group would become ISIS if it only had the weapons, the money and the manpower.
And thanks to the Arab Spring, ISIS got all three.
The Arab Spring was sold as a liberal, secular and democratic movement. It was none of these things. The Free Syrian Army was billed as all three when it was just the front for supplying Jihadist groups with American equipment. Covering up the truth made it necessary for advocates of the Sunni rebels to redirect the blame elsewhere. Foley played a role in blaming another journalist’s kidnapping on Assad. Foley’s own abduction was then blamed on Assad. If Americans knew that the Syrian opposition they were helping was holding Americans for ransom, it might be less inclined to give them weapons.
Even now the lies are holding strong.
Hillary Clinton rolled out her new “hawkish” profile by arguing that the United States should have done more to aid the Syrian rebels early on. The media bristles with articles which insist that the only way to beat ISIS is by allying with other Salafi Jihadists or with the Shiite Jihadists of Iran.
But you don’t defeat Jihadists by allying with them.
Obama tried to court the “moderate” Taliban in Afghanistan. Now the media claims that ISIS is too extreme even for Al Qaeda. Maybe we should ally with Al Qaeda? Before the Gaza War, Obama had embraced Fatah-Hamas unity and refused to cut off aid to their new “technocratic” government.
Then Hamas tried to pull off a coup while going to war with Israel.
The ceasefire agreement pushed by Obama and Kerry on Israel is the work of Qatar, the state sponsor of terror that hosted the “moderate” Taliban for negotiations, funded ISIS and Hamas, smuggled weapons to Libyan Jihadists and pushed the Arab Spring through its Al Jazeera propaganda outlet.
James Foley was brutally murdered because he misunderstood the situation on the ground in Syria, but no matter how many journalists get beheaded in Syria, a month from now Peter Bergen will run yet another CNN piece arguing that “right wing extremists” are the real threat.
No matter how often the heads roll, in the CNN studios someone decides that it’s time to warn us about the threat of “right wing extremism” or to explain to us that the only way we can live in peace with the extremist terrorists is by supporting the moderate terrorists.
No matter how many times the Syrian Jihadists show their true face, there will still be calls to arm them. No matter how many times ISIS, Hamas and all their cousins around the world quote the Koran and declare their global aims, they will be dismissed as JV teams that have nothing to do with Islam.
The price of Islam denial is death. It shouldn’t take a beheading for our elites to lose their illusions, but we have become the United States of James Foley. We don’t learn the truth until we lose our heads.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-beheading-ends-all-illusions-about-islam/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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