Comparing Trump vs Obama against ISIS

This very interesting article does a nice job of reviewing the history of ISIS since 2010, the year that the Obama administration released just killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, using multiple news sources and stories.

Here is a rough timeline:

Obama presidency:
2008: ISIS forces estimated to be about 700 fighters, holding practically no ground.
2010: al-Baghdadi is released.
2011: al-Baghdadi takes over ISIS.
2014: Obama refers to ISIS as a “JV team.”
2015: ISIS forces estimated to be between 20,000 to 31,000 fighters.
2015: ISIS establishes global terrorism network resulting in terrorist attacks worldwide.
2016: ISIS occupies 17,500 square miles, with 35,000 fighters.

Trump presidency:
2017: (July): ISIS pushed out of Mosul.
2017 (October) ISIS in full retreat to U.S. backed forces, loses its capital Raqqa.
2017 (December): ISIS forces now estimated to be 1,000 fighters, holding 1,900 square miles.
2019: al-Baghadi is killed.

At this moment ISIS remains a threat, but a significantly reduced one from its peak in 2016.

Like Trump or hate him, an objective look at how he has handled this issue versus Obama’s handling once again puts the victory mark in Trump’s column. Obama’s policy made things worse in the Arab Middle East. Trump has so far improved things.

The Vegas Massacre Exposé: What Really Happened?

Link here. The article reviews the state of the investigation and notes the endless numbers of issues with it, from contradictory public statements to mysterious police actions to questionable events. The author raises good questions, and shines a light on a story that reeks of corruption and dishonesty, at the highest levels of the FBI and federal government.

There are those who will immediately begin speculating wild conspiracy theories. The story doesn’t require crazy theories, only simple but harsh ones, as noted by the author, linking the Las Vegas massacre to ISIS and some ISIS-allied Saudi power-brokers who have since been defanged by the Saudi government, all with the covert approval of the Trump administration, which also agreed to keep those Saudi links to ISIS and the Las Vegas massacre secret in order to help that friendly Saudi government.

Tiny crowded Israel

Journeying through northern Israel

Much of the world’s political troubles are centered on the question of Israel in the middle of the Middle East. In both the Arab world as well as in some western intellectual circles, there are whole campaigns to make it go away (some peaceful, some genocidal). Politicians, pundits, and intellectuals argue incessantly about the rights of the Palestinians and the Jews, the best solution of achieving peace, and even the question of whether the Jews who have immigrated there have a right to stay.

I have just returned from spending two weeks in Israel, a trip I do somewhat regularly to see family. Each of these visits has given me an on-the-ground close-up look at the situation there, something that is difficult to get from the typically shallow media coverage of the region. And from each of these visits comes at least one essay, something I think is required because of Israel’s significance in much of the world’s political turmoil.

This year, we took a three day sightseeing trip to northern Israel, to visit some Roman ruins, the Sea of Galilee, and an incredible nature preserve that is the springtime home for thousands upon thousands of migrating birds. This excursion thus made this particular Israel visit far different from my half dozen or so previous trips, in that it was the first time I spent a considerable time in Israel proper. All my previous trips visiting family had me spend almost all my time going from one West Bank settlement to another. (That experience resulted in a series of essays on what those settlements are really like, which not surprisingly has no resemblance to their portrayal in the western press. My previous essay, A look at some Israeli West Bank settlements, provides a good summary, but it also provides links to all the previous essays, which are definitely worth the time to read if you want to find out what it is really like in the West Bank. I will give you one clue that might shock you: Hitchhiking is one of the most popular ways to get around.)

Anyway, this three-day trip allowed me to get my first look at Israel itself. The map above shows our route, as indicated by the dotted red line. The numbered Xs were our stops, of which I will discuss below.
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ISIS files “cultural appropriation” complaint against ANTIFA with UN

Link here. The complaint, from ISIS High Command (“somewhere along the Syria-Iraq border”), begins as follows:

As you may know, there is a new category of outrage that “social justice warriors” the world over are fighting to stop: “cultural appropriation.” Loosely defined, this outrage occurs whenever a person, group or organization begins adopting the habits and mannerisms that originate elsewhere…. In this vein, we are writing to file a formal complaint with the UNHRC’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, regarding a matter that we consider most serious: the fact that the recently-organized, global “ANTIFA” movement has:

(1) Culturally appropriated what is clearly ISIS’s trademark black uniforms

(2) Culturally appropriated the terror-tactics we employ while wearing these uniforms

They then provide documented evidence, including photos, and then note, “Now, if you were to see one or the other of these groups marching down your street, would you be able to determine, at a glance, if they are with ISIS, or ANTIFA?”

Their solution?

You might mention to the ANTIFA punks that in quite a few aspects, we are at war with the very same people, organizations and ideas, and, in fact, Western civilization itself. So, if you could arrange a sit-down over tea with us, and them, it might serve all of our interests, and provide a holistic, inclusive resolution to our complaint. Thanks!

Makes perfect sense to me. I mean, really, these guys all seem to have the same goals.

Iraq recaptures Mosul mosque from ISIS

Iraqi troops have recaptured the Mosul mosque where ISIS declared its caliphate three years ago.

After eight months of grinding urban warfare, Iraqi government troops on Thursday captured the ruined mosque at the heart of Islamic State’s de facto capital Mosul, and the prime minister declared the group’s self-styled caliphate at an end. Iraqi authorities expect the long battle for Mosul to end in coming days as remaining Islamic State fighters are bottled up in just a handful of neighborhoods of the Old City.

The seizure of the nearly 850-year-old Grand al-Nuri Mosque — from where Islamic State proclaimed the caliphate nearly three years ago to the day — is a huge symbolic victory. “The return of al-Nuri Mosque and al-Hadba minaret to the fold of the nation marks the end of the Daesh state of falsehood,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement, referring to the hardline Sunni Mulsim group by an Arabic acronym.

The fall of Mosul would in effect mark the end of the Iraqi half of the IS caliphate, although the group still controls territory west and south of the city, ruling over hundreds of thousands of people.

Its stronghold in Syria, Raqqa, is also close to falling.

This defeat of ISIS by Iraqi government forces has been building for months as they have been pushing steadily but slowly forward in heavy street fighting in Mosul. The victory is even more significant in that it has been achieved by Iraq, not American forces, though they have been happily allied with us, and have gladly taken our aid.

Will this victory lessen Islamic radicalism worldwide? No, not likely. The last eight years of bad foreign policy has allowed this evil to fester. It will take a lot more than just the fall of ISIS to cleanse the wound. We still have the Iran government and numerous terrorists organizations running governments throughout the Middle East that are their allies. They are not going away, and their goal of destroying the infidel remains.

Are thousands of Kurds abandoning Islam?

The article, published by a Kurdish news source, describes what appears to be a growing disenchantment with Islam in that region as a result of the violence and destruction of the Islamic State.

Many Muslims are confronted by the violent extremism of the Islamic State (ISIS) and wonder how to reconcile their personal beliefs with the actions of the extremist group. The Kurdish population is approximately 94% nominally Muslim. Recently, however, there have been many reports of Kurds leaving Islam or converting to other religions. The Zoroastrian movement claims to have as many as 100,000 followers in Iraqi Kurdistan. Christian organizations assert that thousands in the region have been seeking out Christianity as they reject ISIS’ interpretation of Islam. There are also reports of growing numbers of atheists and agnostics.

This quote however by an ordinary citizen I think is more significant:

[Sanger Najim, a young man living in Erbil] points the finger of blame at religious leaders for the rise of extremism and growing number of people turning away from Islam. “We don’t have [a] response when people from [the] West [are] telling us that Islam is cruel, Islam is Daesh. We don’t have a response for this. Why? The Mullahs never tell us what real Islam is. They are just reading us some history facts. They are just telling us some history… from old times. They are not able to link it with present society… They have to link Quran with the real life.”

He is horrified by the actions of the Islamic State, but cannot get a satisfactory answer about why this is not Islam from his own Islamic Mullahs.

An attack on Israel coming?

Two stories this morning suggest that an attack soon on Israel from either Iran- or ISIS-backed forces, or both, may soon take place.

The first would be a large attack from the north, near the Golan Heights, planned with the hope of grabbing and holding territory from Israel. The second would be a small terrorist attack. meant only to distract and cause harm. Supposedly Iran and the Islamic State oppose each other, but here they would be working together. Good thing the Obama administration sent Iran $33 billion in cash to help them in this effort.

To get a feel for the hate held by Islamic leaders of all stripes for Jews, watch this excerpt from a Friday sermon by a Hamas MP. Their goal is simple: Kill all the Jews. I wonder how Israel is going to negotiate a two state solution faced with that.

“We don’t need another lecture about Islamophobia.”

Mohammad the bomber

The religion of peace strikes again: Thirty-four are dead and almost 200 injured in suicide attacks in Belgium today.

ISIS has claimed credit for the attacks.

I think the reactions of our politicians here is of some significance, as by contrasting them we can learn a bit about each. Obama inserted a short pro-forma statement of sympathy during his prepared remarks at the start of a press conference in Cuba, then appeared to forget about the entire horrific attack. Donald Trump called for greater border security and a renewed consideration of the use of waterboarding to obtain information from captured terrorists. Hillary Clinton (at the previous link) expressed some incoherent blather about following “our values”.

Ted Cruz possibly spoke with the most clarity.

“Today’s attacks in Brussels underscores this is a war,” Cruz said. “This is not a lone war. ISIS has declared jihad. It is way past time we have a president who will acknowledge this evil and will call it by it’s name and use the full force and fury to defeat ISIS,” he continued. “Until they are defeated, these attacks will continue. Their target is each and every one of us.”

Cruz, one of five remaining presidential candidates, urged America needs a leader who is not afraid to speak about terrorism in bold terms. “We need a president who sets aside political correctness,” Cruz insisted. “We don’t need another lecture about Islamophobia.”

Cruz also criticized Trump’s proposal yesterday that we pull back from NATO.

I leave it to you to decide who appears to have the greatest grasp of the situation. And if you think I am spinning this to favor Cruz, go to the links and get a closer look at the other reactions. Note for example that, other than a twitter comment, I could not even find a story that specifically discussed Hillary Clinton’s reaction.

Update: I have added the cartoon showing Mohammad with a bomb in his turban because I think the response to these thugs has to be to defy them as blatantly as possible. I need to remember to do this more often.

Is ISIS Islamic? Islam scholars say yes!

Link here.

The article highlights two realities. First, the claims by today’s politicians (mostly Democratic but also including President George Bush) that Islam is a religion of peace and that its violent radical elements are distorting the religion is downright false. Second, this conclusion is reached not by western rightwing pundits but Islamic scholars themselves. To quote:

Egypt’s Al-Azhar issued a statement Dec. 11, 2014, refusing to declare the Islamic State (IS) apostates. “No believer can be declared an apostate, regardless of his sins,” it read.

…The “Al-Azhar” referred to is the mosque and university in Cairo that are a center of Sunni learning. So the answer is pretty clear. As far as the center of Sunni learning is concerned, ISIS is not only Islamic but they adhere to most of the same interpretations of Islam. Many scholars have examined ISIS and found that it is very Islamic. And that ISIS is violent precisely because it adheres to Islam. [emphasis mine]

I have trimmed the quotes for length so it is worthwhile to go to the link and read it all. Based on the actions of Islam’s own scholarly leaders, it is a religion that endorses terrorism and murder.

Meanwhile, President Obama remains oblivious, not only to these minor facts but to the ISIS attack in Paris. This weekend his administration released five terrorists, including a man suspected of being one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards.

I ask again, whose side is he really on?

Obama declares “we have contained ISIS” even as they execute an attack in Paris

Irony alert! Yesterday, in an interview with WABC’s Chief Anchor and Democratic Party operative George Stephanopoulos President Obama declared that ISIS has been “contained” by his policies.

“I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” the president told Stephanopoulos in an interview at the White House Thursday. “From the start our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq. And in Syria it — they’ll come in, they’ll leave.”

Today, a terrorist attack planned and executed by ISIS took place in Paris across seven different locations, killing dozens, including many of approximately 100 hostages in a concert hall, where the terrorists had been killing them one-by-one. Police moved in ahead of schedule because they had been getting texts from the hostages begging them to attack because they were going to be executed anyway and a police attack was the only way they had a chance of surviving.

Thank god Nobel Peace Prize-winning Obama has contained ISIS. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see them do this sort of stuff. And it’s a good thing that France has strict gun control laws so the country is gun-free. Otherwise, how would these terrorists get access to weapons?

Islamic State in retreat in Iraq?

Good news? Reports out of Iraq strongly suggest that the Islamic State is in retreat there.

The most encouraging part of the above report is this however:

[I]n the face of a host of problems, Iraq is continuing the democratic process. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, for all his faults (some of which contributed to the rise of Islamic State), relinquished power peacefully. He didn’t give in to the self-fulfilling spiral of paranoia that infects so many Middle Eastern rulers, where you ruthlessly hold on to power in order to keep yourself from being killed by your political opponents. Flawed as Maliki was, he’s been nowhere near as bad as Saddam Hussein, or Bashar Assad, or Ayatollah Khamenei. While Islamic State has rampaged north and west, the Iraqi parliament has investigated the fall of Mosul, pushed back against government corruption, and passed a budget. They’ve plodded along like a normal country, despite their abnormal circumstances

There actually may be cause for some hope in at least this one corner of the Middle East.

The modern horror story

Two stories in the news today illustrate the debased and corrupt culture of our modern leftwing society, even though neither story is about anything that society has actually done.

First there is this story out of Syria of the brutal beheading of an 82-year-old retired archaeologist by ISIS.

Mr Asaad had been detained and interrogated for over a month by the ultra-radical Sunni Muslim militants, who demanded to know where many of the ancient city’s priceless artifacts had been taken in the days before and after ISIS took control of the city. Sickening images proudly shared on social media by supporters of the terror group showed the mutilated remains of Mr Asaad chained to a railing, with his severed head – still wearing glasses – placed on the floor between his feet.

Then there is this story about the release of another undercover Planned Parenthood video.

In the latest video produced by the Center for Medical Progress, Holly O’Donnell describes a medical technician using scissors to cut through the face of a newly aborted but nearly fully developed baby boy at a Planned Parenthood facility so that his intact brain could be extracted.

Both stories describe acts of evil by evil organizations. In the first case it is the brutal murder of a scientist by Islamic fundamentalists merely because he couldn’t produce any gold or silver artifacts for them to melt down for money. In the second, it is the nonchalant dissection of a newborn baby boy, with the technician coolly declaring that this was “…the most gestated fetus and closest thing to a baby I’ve seen.”

To me, however, the real horror is not what these organizations have done, as terrible and evil as it is. The real horror is the willingness of our intellectual elite society, most of whom are liberal and Democrat, to look the other way, either to pretend these things aren’t happening (as in the case of ISIS) or to aggressively defend the organization in its behavior (as in the case of Planned Parenthood).

We all know the saying: “For evil to triumph good men need only do nothing.” In today’s society, I have increasing doubts that the people who want to do nothing about these evils are good.

Pamela Geller a non-person to the Obama FBI

Whose side is Obama on? Though ISIS has specifically put Pamela Geller on its kill list, her calls to the FBI have gone unanswered.

This story reminds me of the fake FBI investigation into the IRS scandal. Obama was outraged by the scandal and said he would hunt down the wrong-doers with every ounce of his being, but the FBI never assigned anyone to lead the investigation, and none of the conservatives who were harassed by the IRS were ever interviewed by any FBI agents.

Here, an American is threatened with death by an Islamic terrorist state, and the FBI, and the Obama administration, does nothing. As I said, whose side is Obama on?

Freedom speaks: An interview with Pamela Geller

Muhammad bomb cartoon

Link here. As she bluntly notes right at the start of the interview:

We incited no one. We didn’t call for violence, justify violence, or approve of violence. The people who were inciting were the ones saying that we should be killed for exhibiting Muhammad cartoons. There is no automatic or unavoidable response to being insulted. No one is forced to kill for being insulted. Those who choose to do so are responsible for their actions. No one else is.

When asked about the criticism that pundits and reporters on both the left and the right have been leveling at her for provoking the attacks, she was equally blunt, though she saved her harshest criticism for the quislings on the right.

This is the problem with the conservatives. This is why we can never nominate qualified, brave, true conservative candidates. The conservative movement has trimmed to accommodate the leftist media so much that they’ve trimmed themselves out of principle. They attack me because they’re desperately afraid that the leftist media will smear them by association with me. It is an act of sheer cowardice.

It has been disgusting these last few days watching the so-called intellectuals of our society, including many reporters who should know better, rush over themselves to blame Pamela Geller and the victims in this Islamic terrorist attack, merely because they exercised their first amendment rights.

The Islamic State has not only claimed credit for the attack, it says it plans to do more, targeting people in as many as 15 states, with Geller as one of those named to its kill list.

And we should blame Geller for the violence? How divorced from reality has our society’s intellectual class become?

What the Islamic State really wants

Link here. This is an incredibly detailed and intelligent background analysis into what the Islamic State is, what it stands for, the roots of those principles, and the dangers it presents to the civilized world.

The article is long but worth every word. Number one take-away from this essay, however, are these two paragraphs:

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal. [emphasis in original]

Another quote almost as important:

[T]he Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks.

I am once again reminded of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where he bluntly told us what he intended to do, and was ignored. We ignore the Islamic State and what it stands for at our very very great peril.

Obama: all religions the same

At his speech today at the National Prayer Breakfast President Obama outlined the moral equivalency between Islam and all other religions, noting that all religions have in the past been “hijacked” by evil people for “for their own murderous ends.”

This is an interesting intellectual argument that is completely meaningless in today’s world. The problem today is not Christian murderers or Jewish murderers or Buddhist murderers. It is Islamic murderers, supported by an Islamic population willing to condone violence in the name of their religion.

You don’t believe me? Then compare the large number of demonstrations in the Islamic world protesting the publication of cartoon drawings of Mohammed by Charlie Hebdo versus the complete lack of outrage in those same places for the burning alive of one prisoner and the beheading of others by the Islamic State. Even if Obama is right, which I do not believe, Islam today is murderous and running amok. We must deal with that reality, not the ivory tower delusions of college professors and incompetent Presidents living in the past.

“They were talking about [killing] hundreds of millions.”

The religion of peace strikes again! The first reporter to successfully embed with ISIS and not get killed gives his report.

“I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam,” but “I didn’t see any mercy in their behavior,” explained Todenhofer. He added, “Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.”

But remember! The Islamic state has nothing to do with Islam.

We don’t need no intelligence briefings

Does this make you feel safer? President Obama routinely misses 60% of his intelligence briefings.

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014. The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.

According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.

This data, coupled with numerous reports showing that the intelligence community was quite clear about the threat of ISIS for years, illustrates how uninformed our President has been about these matters. Worse, it once again proves how willing he is to blame someone else for his own failures.

An ISIS fighter’s previous job was working at American airport

Does this make you feel safer? One of the Americans killed while fighting for ISIS had previously held a job cleaning airplanes in Minnesota.

Multiple sources tell Fox 9 News that, for a time, he worked at a job that gave him security clearance at the airport, access to the tarmac and unfettered access to planes. Two former employees confirmed working with Muhumed at Delta Global Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Airlines.

But hey, the TSA has us covered, focusing like a laser on sexually abusing American citizens rather than wasting time checking the security background of people who actually work at the airports!

ISIS in retreat?

This story is one of several published the last few days that have described the retreat of ISIS from several Kurdish and Iraqi villages.

I hadn’t posted any of the previous stories because I was unsure of their reliability. The number, however, keeps increasing and the sources are becoming more trustworthy. If true, it is mostly good news, though one should always be hesitant about the leadership of any faction in the Islamic Middle East. They might start out sounding good, but too often they end up being either incompetent or as evil as can be imagined.

Identification of unknown airstrikes in Libya revealed

Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have admitted they launched combined air strikes in Libya this past week.

There are two aspects of this story that are significant. First:

Egyptian officials explicitly denied the operation to American diplomats, the officials said. It is almost as if the theme of ignoring and/or mocking US superpower status exhibited most recently by both China and Russia, is gradually spreading to even the more “banana” republics around the world. Because, while one can debate the pros and cons of any previous administration, it is very much improbable that any regime, especially ones as close to the US as the UAE, and to a lesser extent Egypt, would have conducted such military missions without preclearing with the Pentagon first.

Desperate to stop radical Islamists from taking over Libya, Egypt and UAE made the decision to act without U.S. involvement, on their own. They no longer felt obliged to get our advice, or even tell us what they intended to do.

Second, the air strikes illustrate how the Middle East is becoming increasingly destabilized. The U.S. is seen as weak and unwilling to act. Thus, the radicals move to grab power, and the status quo elites feel compelled to respond.

As long as Barack Obama is in power, expect this unstable situation to become even more unstable. When we occupied Iraq we brought stability and the promise of civilized rule of law. Until recently that stability was held together by either our presence or the belief that we would return if things got out of hand. Now everyone in the Middle East knows the U.S. will do nothing, no matter what happens. They are on their own. And the crazies are moving to take advantage of our absence to bring chaos to the region.

A new map of the Middle East

Link here. The wide extent of Islamic State control is scary. It is also interesting that all of the U.S. airstrikes are outside those areas. At first glance it appears that we have terrible aim and are missing our targets. It is more likely that these are areas of dispute and we are supporting Iraqi and Kurdish efforts to regain the initiative.

Only some in the Muslim world condemn ISIS

The Islamic world’s reaction to the ISIS persecution of non-Muslims is decidedly mixed.

This sentence from the link sums the situation up nicely:

At the same time that Islamic religious leaders are mostly silent on the genocide, Islamic political leaders have spoken out.

It appears that Islamic political leaders have generally been forthright in condemning ISIS’s actions, something that we should take heart from. Islam’s religious leaders however have taken a more partisan stand, worrying that ISIS’s actions might harm Islam and thus condemning it for that reason. That Christians and other non-Muslims might be murdered however does not seem to be a concern for these Islamic religious leaders.

Maps showing the territories of the Kurds and the Islamic State

Since I think it useful to have a rough geographical understanding of the situation, I have been digging around to find some maps that will outline the territories controlled by the both the Kurds and the Islamic State (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS]), including the areas of dispute. This link provides the best selection I’ve found so far.

Based on these maps, I wonder when ISIS will start moving into next door Iran, as its western regions are adjacent to their present holdings.

Christians flee Islamic jihadists in northern Iraq

The religion of peace strikes again! Hundreds of thousands of Christians flee northern Iraq as Islamic State take over the region and jihadists tear down churches and destroy Christian manuscripts.

This analysis of the situation now in northern Iraq asks some pointed questions of President Barack Obama, who withdraw American troops from that country far sooner than any military or local expert advised.

This analysis explains why President Barack Obama seems so unconcerned about the fate of these Christian refugees. To use his words, this kind of violence and terrorism and genocide is just an example of these groups acting with “extraordinarily irresponsibly”.

I ask: When are the American people going to finally get tired of electing children to office and have the courage to elect an adult?

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