Friday, November 13th, 2015: It was just another ordinary night in the lively city of Paris, France. Parisians were enjoying their Friday night watching a football (soccer) game at the Stade de France football stadium in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis or jamming to the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan Theater. Shortly after 9 pm local time, the excitement was shattered, and all Hell broke loose.
More than a year ago, 130 innocent Parisians were brutally slaughtered by ISIS members embedded within the French national population. They shot up kids, the elderly, the disabled, all without any mercy. As an ISIS member would later remark to his Yazidi victim in 2016: They are Kafir (infidels, nonbelievers); you should be happy that they died. Any attempt to paint ISIS as anything more humane than a 7th century death cult should be denounced as an affront to human suffering. In their eyes, every non-Muslim (and many less extreme Muslims) deserves death, and so they dealt it out wholesale that night with Kalashnikov rifles, hand grenades, and suicide bombs. The path of death and destruction also caused 368 injuries and countless indelible memories of the bloody horror of that night. This was France’s worst day since the end of the Second World War.
In the year since then, ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups only continued their endless brutality, delivering death and horror to every corner of the globe: Paris again repeatedly, San Bernardino, Orlando, Dhaka, Baghdad, Kabul, Istanbul, Munich, Brussels, Medina, Nice, and other countless sites of unfathomable bloodbaths. Between the start of Ramadan in 2016 and the night of President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, 1169 people lost their lives to Islamic terror (supposedly more before the night ended) in 21 different countries across the globe, 16 of them Muslim countries. The total body count in Baghdad alone exceeded 300 before the summer ended.
The world has reacted with a strong nationalist mindset since then, culminating in the two largest political shocks of this year: Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as the future President of the United States. Globalism has failed in the eyes of many voters: screwing over the working class while favoring large corporations. Open borders in the European Union have led to millions of economic migrants flooding into the Continent from Muslim countries, turning once tolerant countries into powder kegs of conflict between hostile Islamist groups imposing Shariah law and Far Right nationalists seeking to reclaim their countries, no matter the costs. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front political party, is surging in the French national polls, now possibly a leading contender to be France’s next President. German chancellor Angela Merkel’s approval rating has plummeted, and she might be facing a tough reelection next year. The right wing Freedom Party of Austria, founded by former Nazi and SS officer Anton Reinthaller, is now the country’s third largest in terms of number of seats held. Hungary has deported large numbers of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. The Czech Republic President Zeman has urged a complete and total ban on migrants entering the country and for citizens to start arming themselves with guns. Vigilante groups have sprouted all across Sweden and in many other European countries.
If you are an arms dealer, there has never been a better time for you: gun sales are up in Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic as a response to the migrant crisis. For everyone else, we should reflect on all that has transpired since the fateful night in Paris more than a year ago now. President Obama won reelection in 2012, proudly declaring that “GM is alive, and Osama Bin Laden is dead.” He tried to paint a rosy picture then of the civilized world, with America at the forefront, winning the fight against the savagery of Islamic terrorism. Boy was he wrong, and he paid for it heavily: President Trump could easily erase every inch of Obama’s legacy aside from marriage equality and Obamacare, both of which he has stated that he will keep. We must all realize now that we are in a fight for civilization, for the preservation of our world. Our enemy is a virulent ideology hell-bent on conquering and eradicating the planet.
The New York Times recently featured retired General Michael T. Flynn on its cover. Flynn is likely to be either Trump’s National Security Adviser or possibly his Secretary of Defense. The sub-headline recounted Flynn as describing Islam as nothing more than political ideology. Given the New York Times’ political leanings, it is perhaps trying to paint Mr. Flynn as a bit of an extremist and a controversial choice for a national security or Cabinet position. But Mr. Flynn is right on the political nature of Islam. If you doubt him and all the Islamic scholars who agree with him, perhaps you should pick up a Quran yourself and read it all the way through. Wake up to the global danger in our midst before it is too late.
