WarSclerotic

The French connection, Israel Hayom, Ruthie Blum, November 17, 2015

When Islamist leaders condemned Friday night’s Paris attacks, which left more than 132 people dead and hundreds of others critically wounded, you just had to laugh through your tears.

Terror masters in Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Palestinian Authority actually had the gall to talk as if they themselves are not responsible for the ongoing murder of innocent people.

But hypocrisy, mendacity and lying as a matter of course are not the only reasons for their public expressions of solidarity with France during this frightful hour. In fact, what really bothers them is the fear that a rival group may be beating them at their own game. And hell hath no fury like a scorned, power-hungry radical Muslim with hegemonic aims and weapons with which to achieve them.

Such monsters, some in suits and ties to throw you off, are able to get away with playing the West for fools — particularly when the so-called leader of the free world keeps kowtowing to them, while espousing denial as a policy. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the bloodbath in Paris, U.S. President Barack Obama made a statement that put a smug smile on the faces of jihadists everywhere.

In the first place, he called the carnage “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.” This is an amazing assertion, since I don’t even share Obama’s values, let alone those of a great portion of “humanity” inside and out of Washington, D.C. You know, like the multimillions of anti-Semites, Christian-killers, women-subjugators and child-abusers who are trying to win the war over the world’s character and soul.

Secondly, the president said he didn’t “want to speculate at this point in terms of who was responsible for this.”

Right, responded radical Muslims in the privacy of their bunkers and bomb factories, for all Obama knew, the shootings and explosions in a theater, restaurants and at a soccer stadium could have been carried out by disgruntled Buddhists.

By the time he arrived in Antalya to attend the G-20 economic summit less than 48 hours later, even the U.S. president could no longer plead ignorance. So he had to address the issue of Islamic State tentacles spreading every which way, in spite of his having announced a few days earlier that its threat had been “contained.”

Even members of the left-leaning media were challenging his claim that the way he’s been fighting the al-Qaida spin-off is still the right one. And this, while sidling up to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose recent landslide re-election was a dark day for people with those ostensibly “universal” values Obama had mentioned.

The good news here is also the bad.

Effectively combating Islamic State is actually irrelevant in the wider context, as counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka has been trying to explain for years.

That Friday night’s multiple attacks in Paris were carried out by terrorists affiliated with ISIS is “wholly irrelevant,” Gorka — national security editor at Breitbart and military affairs fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — told me this weekend. “All members of the global jihadist movement, be they Sunni or Shia, Arab, Persian or converts, are driven by the same desire: the need to kill the kuffar [infidels] for the glory of Allah. All attacks, be they 9/11, 7/7, Mumbai, Amman, Paris or the recent stabbings in Israel, are tied together by the connective tissue of jihadist ideology.”

He stressed, “It is time for us to realize — and demand of our leaders that they act accordingly — that we face an existential threat, which, over the long term, could be as dangerous as Hitler’s Third Reich. This is a war between good and evil. And only one side will prevail in the end.”

I still harbor hope that the former will emerge victorious. But this cannot happen unless certain conditions are met. These include: getting the nuclear-deal-obsessive Democrats out of the White House; making Europe understand that it should be labeling undesirable Islamists, not Israeli products; and raising children in the West to grasp that the blessed ability to live in a free society means being prepared to die defending it against its detractors and destroyers.