CAN THE LEFT LEARN TO LOVE ISIS? Daniel Greenfield posits that “The West is making many of the same mistakes with Islamism that it did with Communism. And it’s making them for the same reasons:”
Like Communist leaders, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations base their operations out of the West. Lenin conducted his campaign out of Munich and London, Trotsky operated out of Austria, London and New York. Today the Muslim Brotherhood operates out of London and Austria. The Blind Sheikh ran the Islamic Group out of New York. The Ayatollah Khomeini organized the Islamic Revolution in Iran from a Paris suburb. ISIS draws on thousands of European recruits.
If the West had really wanted to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle”, as Churchill had urged, it had the key players living in its own cities. If the West really wanted to shut down the Jihad, it could do more by going after the Salafist networks in its own cities than by bombing Syria.
The United States is the fourth most popular country for ISIS tweeters. The UK is in the top ten.
The State Department is offering a $25 million reward for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current head of Al Qaeda and the man behind its ideology, but he visited mosques in California on a fundraising trip during the Clinton era. Abu Musab al-Suri, another key Al Qaeda ideologue, operated out of Spain. Anwar al-Awlaki lived comfortably in the United States until he was ready to step into a global role.
The West doesn’t really want to defeat Islamic terrorism. It responds to terrorism while ignoring the ideology. And then it roots around for root causes that coincidentally turn out to all involve progressive policy priorities like economic inequality and global warming.
And let’s face it — crushing ISIS would simply be giving them exactly what they want, as so many leftists remind us:
The Islamic State terrorist group wants nothing more than for the U.S. Armed Forces to destroy it, politicians and pundits say.
Dozens of thought leaders familiar with the terrorist group say that its members yearn for the day that close air support from an A-10 Warthog cuts them in half while coalition soldiers storm Raqqa.
“They are begging for U.S. troops on the ground,” former Obama administration official Van Jones said. “That’s what they want.”
“The one thing ISIS wants the most: American boots on the ground,” CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria said.
“As long as we’re relying on military force, this is the kind of terms [sic] that ISIS wants. This is what strengthens them,” Institute for Policy Studies scholar Phyllis Bennis said.
“More war is exactly what ISIS wants,” Sen. Angus King (I., Maine) said.
It’s comforting to know that America’s television studios are flooded with experts who know ISIS better than ISIS itself: