Perhaps the Time is Here to Identify All of Islamic State

 

President Trump has claimed that the Islamic State has been defeated simply because they have been successfully pushed from Syria and Iraq. Pushing something to relocate to a different hot-spot is not eliminating it. To eliminate the Islamic State, President Trump is going to have to go to places he prefers to ignore or it will come back to bite him in the future. The Islamic State is exactly what one might think about their losses in Syria and Iraq, madder than all get up, we thought better than saying the wording which first came to mind. But they have not been defeated and just like other terror groups which were claimed to be defeated but simply relocated, Islamic State is still a viable threat. The bad news for President Trump is that the Islamic State he claims to have defeated has relocated many of their resources and leading people to the Sinai Peninsula where they are a threat to the Egyptian government as well as to Israel. The good news for Israel is that having the Islamic State in the Sinai threatening Egypt has caused Egypt to close their border with Gaza making arming Hamas more difficult for those wishing to press that front against Israel. Egyptian President Sisi would be wise to ask President Trump to aid Egypt in ridding the Sinai of the Islamic State menace along with numerous other criminal and terrorist entities.

 

But we want to talk about the forgotten from which belongs to the Islamic State but has been conveniently dismissed as unimportant by the developed world including President Trump. The loss of four Americans in Niger, four Green Berets Special Forces, in an ambush by Islamist terrorists, Boko Haram terrorists, is sad and some have asked why United States forces are in Niger. We ask the opposite question posing why there are but eight-hundred troops stationed there largely as advisors and training officers. All told, six-thousand United States military personnel are deployed in Africa where the majority works on construction projects and in supporting the aerial drone surveillance operations. Why is there not a more substantial support in Niger as the United States had in Syria and Iraq against Islamic State? Perhaps we need refresh memories with two small items. First, Boko Haram swore their allegiance to Islamic State over two year ago in early 2015. President Trump promised to defeat the Islamic State wherever they existed and did not claim only in Syria and Iraq. But maybe President Trump meant he only wanted to destroy the Islamic State where the media was covering the fight as he wished for glory, not results. Islamic State terror must be fought wherever it takes root and everywhere it takes root or that weed has not been pulled. Islamic State is Boko Haram and Boko Haram is Islamic State, the two are wed in ideology and their desire to take their destructive ideology and spread it over the entirety of our planet. This is the reason that they must be eradicated from every corner they have infested, and that includes across the entirety of the continent of Africa.

 

African Transition Zone

 

To make things easier for President Trump, please allow us to present the above map of the region known as the African Transition Zone where Africa is divided between the areas controlled by Islam and the Christian, Animist and other religious beliefs. North of the zone is Islamic and south is not and the terrorists operating along the entire region intend to push the dotted boundary of Islam ever southward until stopped. Maybe Africa does not have the attention of the Middle East, but it is no less important in this battle for world dominance between Islam and everybody else. This is not the great battle between Communism and Democratic freedom, this is the great battle between Islam and freedom of religion or even freedom from religion if you happen to be a post-modernist European leftist who believes that religion is the opiate of the masses. Trust that Islam will devour your socialist religion free society and force everyone to bow to Allah just as fast as they would a Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto or other religious nations. The Islamists do not care what religion or lack of religion you worship or refuse to worship, they only care that you do not believe the religion that they hold to and they are willing to kill everybody who refuses to follow Islam if that is what it takes to make the world follow Islam and only Islam. Don’t even think for a moment that you have nothing to fear about the message Islam presents just because you are an Atheist, because the reality is you have the most to fear as they consider Atheists to be idolaters. And yes the continent of Africa is worth saving just as Europe is worth fighting to keep free, Asia is worth retaining as free, and the Americas are worth fighting to keep free and Israel is worth defending despite or because it is in the center of the maelstrom. The fight against Islam, or at least to reform Islam, is the most imperative and important struggle the world faces and the entire world faces this whether they wish to admit such or not.

 

Currently there are forces who believe they can bait the tiger and come away unscathed because the tiger is devouring others. This is foolish thinking and will only serve to allow the tiger to feast unmolested for so long. Eventually the tiger will desire feasting on something new and that might be when the tiger turns on those befriending it today, as that is what tigers do, they eat by preying on others. Perhaps the tiger is not the best animal to use in the analogy for Islam. Islam is more like locusts or army ants devouring everything in their path and when they finish one area then continue on to the next area. Then, from time to time they cease, and appear to go into hibernation until the wind picks up in just the right direction or the urge to move the next strikes and they fly or march on to new grazing grounds and eat everything in their path along the way. They marched across the Middle East into India and across Northern Africa and into eastern and western Europe between 622A.D. and 750A.D. (see map below) before resting. They then resumed their expansion as the Ottoman Empire before being pushed back and then presumably defeated during World War I. This was a very temporary defeat as we are witnessing today.

 

Expansion of Islam Across MENA and into Europe before Ottoman Rule

 

The victors in World War I colonized the areas where the Arabs and Muslims had conquered with the exception of Iran, Turkey, Albania and a few other places. The only places where Islam has been pushed from largely are Spain (Andalusia) and India though Muslims still live in both nations. Israel is the other place where Islam lost their control but that has been fraught with continuous attempts to rectify the situation; one might say, with the Israelis proving quite a bit stubborn about holding on to their lands, something they had been thousands of years prior as well. Islam slept for close to a thousand years and is once again waking and becoming resurgent. Should this be permitted to continue without some modifications allowing other religions and even no religion to coexist with Islam, then people had best ready their prayer rugs and be prepared to pray facing Mecca five times every day. There currently is no compromise once Islam takes control of an area. There are records of places where Islam permitted non-Muslims to reside as Dhimmi, a form of second-class personage, for as long as they served Islam and remembered their inferiority. Even with good behavior, eventually the Muslims reach a point where they demand everyone convert to Islam or be put to the sword, or of late a knife. This is a reality which the entire world could face should the non-Islamic powers not wake and realize the peril they are actually facing. History is a brutal teacher but as in the West history is not a subject much studied any longer, perhaps those who have studied history might refresh everybody’s memory and grab a few leaders’ attentions. For our American friends, allow us to give them two wars they might wish to study, the First and Second Barbary Wars. The Barbary Pirates were Islamic terrorists of their day and that is the most revealing way to describe them. You see, the United States has been fighting Islamic terrorism since day one. That is a truth and the American people would be well advised to realize what they are facing before it becomes too late.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Hashtag Solution, A Solution for the Modern Age?

Even Michelle Obama joined in the recent new world technique of using social media as the solution to every problem joining the possibly many-millions to go to Twitter and post the #BringBackOurGirls as a protest against the Boko Haram kidnapping of close to three-hundred school girls in Nigeria. The people who joined in this protest were supporting the modern method of societal condemnation as a means to address a serious problem, and such an approach could likely have effects on many social and societal problems, but will not work anywhere near as well on a terrorist groups such as Boko Haram who firstly are not that likely to honestly care about a Twitter campaign even if they were to be on-line and actually even see it. This little phenomenon seems to be more wishes than substance and might serve to make some people feel empowered as they were capable of committing an act against this heinous criminal act of terrorism and perhaps for the reason that there was not much more that they could have been empowered to do, such an act is noteworthy. Unfortunately, in the real world where bullets and machetes are far more powerful than hashtags and terrorists in some remote parts of the world from those of us whose world revolves around hashtags and the like, this demonstration will have little effect on a desperate situation. But we would like to credit those who participated in this demonstration of solidarity with the plight of the Nigerian people in general and their kidnapped school girls in  particular and hope that the one result that might prove positive from their efforts comes to fruition, the nations with the military and enforcement resources and manpower take these wishes as further reason to take actual steps to end the reign of terror which has been perpetrated by Boko Haram over the past decades once and for all. Should that result and the #BringBackOurGirls be credited with having given any impetus to these actions, then hurrah for Twitter and social media’s now proven greater power. The one thing that has become evident is that those who are in positions to address this tragedy apparently needed some prodding, and that brings us to the reality that needs to be changed.

 

Where many might label First Lady Michelle Obama’s joining the social media efforts of the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign as being useless, but had her actions also have caused her to pressure her slightly more strategically positioned husband, the United States President and Commander in Chief over the full might and capabilities of the United States military and intelligence communities, to actions which could go much further in bring this tragedy to a more acceptable end but through the lack of such actions it appears they have thus far not been so ordered. Just over a month ago the world mobilized unbelievable resources to seek over a far wider area including much of the Indian Ocean for an airliner which had fallen off tracking radars and transponders had failed or been switched off yet in this situation where the search area was considerable smaller almost no resources available to the many nations of the world were brought to bear. That asks the big question of why, were the apparent lives of the two-hundred-thirty-nine passengers and crew of the Malaysian jetliner more precious or more important than the slightly larger number of Nigerian school girls? Why was it completely understandable and logical to invest multiple-millions of resources looking for the possible, no matter how remote, survivors of a lost plane and not as understandable or logical to seek and free these innocent school girls in Nigeria? It is not as if there are not at least a half-dozen nations with Special Forces troops who are trained explicitly for just this sort of missions, saving abductees and kidnap victims from terrorists and criminals. Some nations such as the United States, Britain, Russia and Israel have what are touted as some of the best of the best at rescuing hostages held by terrorists who would likely have honorably volunteered to take on such a mission and would feel denied if their commanders refused to even suggest they be given the support and opportunity to save these innocent lives. I realize that there may be troops and special tactical units in the process at this moment working to save these young women and if there are we wish them G0d’s speed and blessings on their tasks at hand. But even if troops have not been tasked to assist, could not those nations with highly advanced surveillance aircraft and satellites have at the very least offered their use to at the very least pinpoint the probably location of these innocent victims thus providing some valuable information to those willing to risk it and take on this rescue mission? Surely locating young women held hostage by an internationally recognized terrorist group would take precedence over gathering meta-data of every electronic communication on the planet, and maybe those records could be combed to seek a clue, at least then it might serve a less nefarious purpose.

 

Then there are probably the most egregious factoids which have come to light about this entire situation which relate to the history of the Western nations with Boko Haram. The worst is that the United States State Department and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided after other heinous assaults in Nigeria including the murdering of over fifty young men at a boarding school where many were killed in their sleep and others trapped within the school and burned to death yet there general consensus was not to label Boko Haram as a terrorist groups as doing so might actually give them a better standing allowing them to recruit more followers. The United States was not alone in refusing to label Boko Haram as a terrorist organization as neither had any other nations so labeled the group outside of Nigeria and the surrounding nations who were victim to their actions. This reluctance to call terror by its name and recognize terrorism when and where it rears its ugly violence appears to be a growing problem in the United States and much of Europe and even beyond. It often appears that the people in power and in the positions to make such determinations honestly believe that if they do not call terror by its name and identify terror wherever they find it then there will be less of a need to combat terror as it can be claimed that it is not as endemic a problem or as pervasive as it really had become. This is just another epidemic of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, and never ever speak evil’s name and then maybe we can all go happily on ignoring the evil and it will not touch our lives. Somehow I can only believe that such an attitude will only lead to many more victims and a far more serious and possibly eventually an insurmountable problem simply because our leaders chose to ignore a festering problem and simply pretend it did not exist. This has never worked in the past and has inevitably produced some of the more horrific problems which have required enormous amounts of efforts and resources to finally defeat once the problem metastasized and left the world no choice but to excise it. That leaves one last question, what will be the final price this time and how many are the leaders of the world willing to sacrifice in their blinding will to pretend that all is well with the world and terrorism has been defeated and no longer poses a problem anywhere or in any measure. Such beliefs are beyond any rational thinking and are the refuge of those unwilling to take a stand on principles and protect the civilized world, the same civilized world they actually believe they are sparing the troubles and difficulties which confronting terrorism would cause. They honestly believe that by refusing to fight terrorism with equal or greater force will eventually defeat terrorism as the purveyors of terror will not continue to have the willpower to continue their fight to subjugate the world to their vision of a perfect world. The one thing history has proven repeatedly is that those with a vision of a perfect world, no matter how hellish their view, will never give up or surrender and must be opposed and beaten into submission and the longer the rest of the world allows such nightmares to continue and grow stronger, the worse the final conflagration necessary to eradicate that nightmare. Winston Churchill said it best stating, “Still if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

 

Beyond the Cusp