The news last week about ISIS held some of the most disturbing and repugnant details we have read about this terrorist organization. In a criminal complaint filed against a woman, Umm Sayyaf, for holding an American captive who was later murdered, the Justice Department listed the horrid details: The American woman, 27-year-old Kayla Mueller, was doing humanitarian work in Syria when she was kidnapped by ISIS outside a Doctors Without Borders hospital.
Umm Sayyaf and her husband, Abu Sayyaf, who was later killed in a Delta Force raid, held Mueller and several other women captive. (Umm Sayyaf is currently being held in Iraq but she's now charged in United States for providing material support to a terrorist organization, resulting in the death of Mueller.)
But if you think Mueller's death was tragic, the details are even worse. Umm Sayyaf apparently told authorities that while Mueller was held captive, she was raped repeatedly by the leader of this ISIS group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He carries the title of caliph, which is supposedly the political and religious leader of their caliphate.
Americans need to think long and hard about this horrible news. If the leader of ISIS will repeatedly rape an innocent woman, what type of barbarians are we up against? If he is head of the caliphate, do his followers see this as a signal that they can do the same? News of beheadings and crucifixions in Syria and Iraq have been terrible enough, but one could always think that maybe the executioners were maybe heretics or lone actors not fully sanctioned by their leadership. But when the leader of the entire ISIS terrorist group rapes a 27-year-old American woman, repeatedly, as a matter of a daily routine, it's time for Americans to wake up to the evil that threatens our country and all the values we cherish.
George W. Bush's strategy against al-Qaida was to go after them in their safe havens in Afghanistan, disrupting their training camps and scattering them to the mountains. His was an aggressive, not a passive, strategy. Whether you agree with it or not, the American homeland was kept amazingly safe in the aftermath of more than 3,000 Americans being killed by religious fanatics on September 11, 2001.
Barack Obama's response to the ISIS threat has been more passive, even though that outfit grows stronger every day and extends its tentacles to countries like Afghanisatan and Libya. Whether you agree with the president's passive strategy, we have now seen innocent Americans murdered in Chattanooga, Tenn., and San Bernardino, Calif. ISIS is now threatening a terrorist attack in America larger than 9/11.
Will it take that kind of attack to shake Americans out of our complacency and Obama out of his passivity? We hope and pray this will not be the case. Or at least we hope it will not happen until we can get a new president with a new strategy to take on the greatest barbarian threat to Western civilization in decades.