When the allied coalition landed in Normandy on D-Day the casualties were appalling, but the West had made a decision. Germany had to be stopped. Violent aggression was intolerable and we ended it. Can we say the same thing about Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere? Do they have the courage to die by the thousands to put an end to Islamic aggression that threatens the world, or do they prefer to play games that have a very different payoff and will never put a stop to the bloodshed?
Obama’s disaster: U.S. Middle East policy won’t work here
The gulf between the West and the Middle East is wider than ever. Our commander in chief’s Muslim sympathies have not prevented a U.S. foreign policy disaster in the region. If anything, they have made it worse (see: Stupid Foreign Policy Mistakes That Hurt Us).
Despite the president’s insistence on distancing extremists from the religion that inspires them, he tried to sound determined when he asked Congress for the use of our armed forces:
If left unchecked, ISIL will pose a threat beyond the Middle East, including to the United States homeland.1
Two arrests in Aurora, Illinois last week, one man plotting an attack on the homeland and his cousin journeying to hitch his fortune to ISIS should be enough to clue us in that the threat is already here.
Obama and Kerry’s plan for a global coalition is not going to save us from homegrown insurgents. It is not going to save us from jihadists in the Middle East or anywhere else where Islam flourishes. The question is not even what we need to do to put a stop to extremist aggression in the Middle East that will spread across the globe. That’s a job for Muslims, not the West. They need to pay attention to the lessons of D-Day. Muslims everywhere need to find the courage and the will to take care of a mess their faith created.
Muslim coalition against Islamist attacks?
There comes a point where a people need to determine their destiny. The Arab Spring wasn’t that destiny. How much killing can the world tolerate while Muslims wait?
The cost in lives in the European Theater was astounding. Despite growing agreement that jihadist Muslims threaten the world, we aren’t seeing that kind of resolve in the Middle East. We don’t see it on the home front, either, where CAIR uses its voice to protest perceived political and legal slights against Islam’s followers instead of pursuing a global call to action. What we are seeing is wanton cruelty manipulated to make the headlines, from Boko Haram beheadings in Nigeria to last week’s Al-Shabaab killings in a Somali hotel to whatever this week’s reports will be of the newest ISIS atrocities.
Lip service at home and overseas is not going to take care of a global Muslim problem any more than Barack Obama’s version of the Munich Agreement will halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions or its desire to inflame the region. If there was ever a time for the U.S. not to appease Iran, which has its fingers in everything from Houthi rebels in Yemen to the ongoing meltdown in Iraq, that time is now.
West can’t do what Muslims refuse
The Muslim world has taken the kind of Western intervention off the table that will exterminate extremists in numbers sufficient to make a difference, if a difference can still be made. When it comes to creating terrorists Islam has incredible tenacity and has reached countries as far apart as the U.S. and Australia. We can deal with the problem here at home. It is abundantly clear that we can’t deal with it overseas.
Obama issued a call to action to deal with ISIL:
show the world we are united in our resolve to counter the threat posed by ISIL.2
The West may or may not be united, but we aren’t the ones who count.
How many Muslims will lay down their lives?
Muslims need to remember what happened on D-Day. We believed that our values, both political and religious, required us to stop what Germany was doing. Instead of going from crisis to crisis and attack to attack in the parts of the world where their religion means death, they need to decide if loss of life on the scale that the West suffered is worth it. Do future generations deserve a Muslim D-Day, or is what we are witnessing so ingrained in the religion and culture of Islam that things can only get worse?
As long as we keep playing a game of piecemeal intervention, stepping in and drawing back while witnessing the futility of our efforts, Muslims will not be forced to decide which direction their faith will take them. If they don’t make that decision and summon the courage to deal with insurgents, jihadists, and extremists even at the risk of incredible loss of life, it will prove that everything we fear about their goals and beliefs is true.
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