Daniel Greenfield, Author at Israel Rising

Originally published on Sultan Knish.

Before long the same administration that declared the fighting in Iraq over several times will claim victory over ISIS. The timetable for its push against the Islamic State appears to have less do with the victimized Christians and Yazidis who have been prevented from coming here as refugees in favor of Syrian Muslims than with the Clinton presidential campaign. Like Obama’s declarations that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over, the announcement that ISIS has been defeated will be premature.

It is based on a profound misunderstanding and misreading of Islamic terrorism.

Long before its current string of defeats, ISIS had begun evolving into another Al Qaeda; a multinational alliance of Jihadists scattered around the world. Bombing Mosul isn’t hard, but try bombing Marseille, Brussels or London. There is no doubt that the ability of ISIS to temporarily establish a caliphate allowed it to build a network that could carry out terror attacks from New York to Miami to Nice to Munich. But it would be dangerous to assume that losing Iraq and Syria will stop ISIS.

ISIS doesn’t matter. The idea of ISIS does. And the idea of ISIS is Islamic supremacism.

The organization we think of ISIS has transformed and rebranded countless times. Even now our leaders vacillate between calling it ISIS, ISIL or, more childishly, Daesh, while it dubs itself the Islamic State. We have been fighting it in one form or another for over a decade. It would be unrealistically optimistic to assume that the war will end just as this old enemy has shown its ability to strike deep in our own cities.

The bigger error though is to think that we are fighting an organization. We are fighting an idea. That is not to contend, as Obama does, that we can debate it to death. It is not the sort of idea that argues with words, but with bullets, bombs and swords. But neither does it just go away if you seize a city.

Al Qaeda in Iraq not only survived the death of Zarqawi, but it became even more dangerous under Baghdadi. It would be risky to assume that ISIS will die with him. Instead it may very well grow into a new phase of Al Qaeda, one that ties together some of the world’s deadliest Islamic terror groups into a network that is decentralized enough that it will not suffer from Al Qaeda’s leadership fatigue.

The rise of Islamic terrorism has been an incremental process in which new groups learn from the mistakes of the old and supersede them. If ISIS does recede into a localized oblivion, reemerging only on occasion to suicide bomb something or someone in Baghdad, then a deadlier and even more effective group is likely to take its place. Each group will move one step closer to realizing the caliphate.

To break the cycle, we must confront the idea of the caliphate at the heart of Islamic terrorism.

ISIS is not un-Islamic. It is ruthlessly and uncompromisingly Islamic in that, unlike its predecessors in the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, it makes the fewest compromises to civilizational sensibilities. Its goals are the same as those of every Islamic political organization, including those dubbed moderate. It seeks to restore and enforce an Islamic system in every part of the Muslim world before moving on to conquer and subjugate the non-Muslim world. If this were merely some fringe belief held by a tiny minority of extremists, then it could be bombed to pieces in some Syrian or Iraqi backwater.

But it’s the driving force of Islam. That’s why it won’t go away. No amount of appeasement will banish it.

Taking in more Muslim settlers, pressuring Israel and letting the Muslim Brotherhood colonize our foreign policy won’t do it. We’ve tried it and it actually makes Islamic terrorism much worse.

When the announcement is made, the usual suspects will pat themselves on the back for having defeated ISIS by mobilizing a Muslim coalition. But it wasn’t Obama who mobilized a Muslim coalition. The coalition, such as it was, mobilized them. Obama provided useful support to Islamic state sponsors of terror, such as Iran and Turkey, assorted Islamic Jihadists on the ground, some blatantly associated with Sunni and Shiite terror groups in their internal Jihadist conflict with ISIS over who will fight us.

The “allies” we are aiding today will be the ones bombing us tomorrow.

And that is why claiming credit for beating ISIS accomplishes nothing. ISIS is an expression of an Islamic impulse encoded in the Koran. Islamic groups differ in the tactical expression of that impulse. ISIS was nastier and uglier than most of the Islamic terror groups we had dealt with before this. Though even it found its Boko Haram affiliate in Nigeria occasionally a little too much to stomach.

If ISIS vanishes from the world stage, Islamic terrorism will be easier to dismiss. Or so the thinking goes. The Islamic State was better at viral videos than the media that tried to whitewash Islamic terror. It was hard to ignore. But a scattering of Islamic terror groups around the world will be forgotten by the public.

History suggests that’s wishful thinking.

Islamic terrorism has shown no signs of receding. Growing Muslim populations, both at home and in Muslim settlements in the West, and the increase in travel and communications, the infrastructure of globalism, spread it from the most backward to the most advanced parts of the world. Wealthy and unstable Muslim countries, rich in oil but poor in power, finance its spread through mosques and guns.

These are the ingredients that give us ISIS or any other combination or letters that stands for Islamic terror. To do anything meaningful about it, we would have to reverse the decline of the West.

Islam originally spread into a vacuum created by civilizational decline. Civilizational decline is why it is rising once again. An obscure local terror group eventually turned into ISIS by filling a power vacuum. Even as Obama performs another touchdown dance, some other group will be making that same journey. Its mission will be the familiar one of replacing our civilization with its own.

Until we come to terms with this civilizational struggle, we will go on fighting endless wars in the sand and coping with endless terror attacks in our own cities because we have failed to recognize the nature of the enemy. We are not fighting an acronym, whether it’s ISIS or ISIL; we are fighting an Islamic State.

This is a war to determine whether the future will belong to the West or to Islam.

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Originally Published on Sultan Knish

Halfway to the sky sits a tiny village of little white houses that has attracted the ire of the White House.

The village of Amona with its small white houses and red roofs could easily be mistaken for some lost Italian village or a dusty California town. But the White House would not have “boiled in anger”, as one anonymous official claimed, over the doings of some Italian village.

There’s only one place on earth that makes Obama’s blood boil. It isn’t Iran or North Korea. It’s Israel.

Amona’s small scattering of houses have a fraction of the square footage of the White House. The 40 families living there in defiance of Islamic terrorists and left-wing lawfarers would hardly be noticeable if they all crowded into the White House foyer. And yet they’ve been condemned by the State Department in more virulent tones than most Muslim dictators.

What is it about this handful of Jews caught between heaven and earth that outrages so many?

That may be the great question of history. It will not be solved among the sheep pens and orchards, the little white houses of Amona and their inhabitants, who despite the rage of the big White House, continue to go to work each day, to raise their children and to worship in the way of their ancestors.

In the official parlance of the media, Amona is a “settlement”. That is to say it dates back a mere 3,300 years to the time when Joshua, born a slave in Egypt, commanded the Jews, “’Go and walk through the land, and describe it, and come back to me, and I will cast lots for you here before the Lord in Shilo.”

Today Shilo is a city of some 3,500. Like Jerusalem, it is also deemed a settlement. But on the list of places described by Joshua’s men, the mere speck of Amona appears before Jerusalem.

But then Amona, unlike Jerusalem, vanished from history. For thousands of years the name would have only meant something to the most dedicated biblical scholars. And then the left went to war against Amona. And out of that hatred the forgotten town was raised up from its forgotten place in history.

The handful of families living in Amona have been the subject of more legal proceedings, international debates, threats and international outrage than most genocides. 3,000 feet above sea level, its residents look up at a kind blue sky and down at an angry world that is unwilling to let them live in peace.

They meet the challenges of gravity and rage with simple faith. Asked about the threat of Islamic terror, a 5-year old girl answered, “As God helped Joshua, so he will also help us.”

Amona and its residents need all the help they can get. They have been under siege for decades. What the Islamic terrorists couldn’t do to the residents, lawyers and activists who receive funding from the Soros network and assorted international left-wing billion dollar organizations, strive to accomplish.

Demolition and eviction orders have been issued. Police have converged on the handful of buildings with clubs and yells. In one such battle a 15-year-old girl, whom we only know as Nili, stood in their way. The image of the teenage girl blocking the path of dozens of riot police in black became a Pulitzer Prize winning photo. “Anyone who looks today at the ruins of the houses in Amona – understands that in this operation there was no sense whatever, except destruction,” she said in an interview.

There is still no sense whatsoever to the war against Amona except destruction. It isn’t about the land.

Amona’s main antagonist is the extremist left-wing group Peace Now. There is nothing peaceful about Peace Now which seeks peace only with Islamic terrorists. One co-founder, Uri Avnery, declared, “The time has come to bury them.” Another Peace Now co-founder, Yigal Tumarkin weighed in, “My true contribution would be if I grabbed a sub-machine-gun, instead of a pen and pencil, and killed them.”

The children of Israel’s small towns and villages excite such unnatural fury from left-wing notables.

Under pressure from a radical left-wing judiciary, Israel’s government decided to relocate the families of Amona by building houses for them in Shilo. It is this which reportedly made Obama boil like a little teapot. The Jews of Amona are not to be permitted to live in their town. Or in any other.

According to some anonymous official, the plan to build houses for the evacuees in Shiloh is “of great concern” to the White House. Anyone wondering why Obama isn’t concerned about ISIS or the economy had better realize that his eye is firmly fixed on a small town in Israel up against the bulldozer.

And he’s determined to see to it that the bulldozer wins.

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner claimed that building 98 homes would endanger peace. Peace in Israel is as dead as the dodo. But somehow it never seems to be endangered by any amount of Muslim suicide bombings, stabbings or rockets. The Palestinian Authority funds Islamic terrorism by paying salaries to terrorists using taxpayer money dispensed to them by Obama.

And this butchery of Jewish families and massacres of Rabbis in no way endangers peace.

It is only the very real risk that the families of Amona might find some shelter that renders the glorious infrastructure of “a viable Palestinian state more remote”. Like Haman, the Islamic terrorist state cannot stand to see a Binyaminite, no matter how alone, standing tall in defiance of its hunger and malice. These handfuls of homes represent, according to the State Department, “perpetual occupation.”

State has a point. 3,300 years isn’t quite perpetual, but it’s a lot longer than Toner has been hanging around D.C. It’s a long longer than appeasers who know not to eat with their left hand and to curse Israel when visiting Muslim countries have been sliming their way around Foggy Bottom.

Can a few dozen families really “block” the rise of an Islamic terrorist state in Israel? During Israel’s War of Independence the small village of Kfar Darom held out against sustained assaults from the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists was an Egyptian Jihadist named Yasser Arafat.

Moral courage enables a handful of people to do what the massive array of government cannot.

Nili explained her actions by saying, “You see me in the photograph, one against many, but that is only an illusion. Behind the many stands one man… but behind me stands the Lord.” Today that man is Barack Hussein Obama. The residents of Amona stand in the way of his dream of an Islamic Palestine.

Who are the people of Amona? For the most part, they are children. Amona has nearly 200 of them. 5 children are on the small side for a local family. Today Amona could pass for a village, tomorrow it’s a town and the day after it’s a city. That has been Israel’s history. In a world where the great cities of civilization are overrun by the terrible tide of Muslim demographics, it is a place whose people still believe in the future. Such little villages full of white houses with red roofs are fortresses of hope.

In Amona, you will find deer meandering through the street. The Nizri family, with eight children, sees to the casks of French oak in the winery. There are raspberries to pick, tools to mend and a life to build.

It is not mere height above sea level that enables the people of Amona to tower above their enemies. It is their determination to live lives of ordinary courage. They have attracted the ire and enmity of some of the most powerful people in their country, their region and the world. And yet they go on.

Obama boils in his anger like a lobster in a pot. The UN Security Council has scheduled a special meeting where Israel will be denounced by the likes of Venezuela and Angola. And in Amona, the children play.

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Author: Daniel Greenfield

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