Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist who late in life did a profound about-face – going from leftist supporter of revolutionary movements to resolute defender of the West and vocal opponent of Islamic fundamentalism – died ten years ago this week in Florence.

The 77-year-old Fallaci had been battling cancer for years, but her illness had no discernable effect on her legendary combativeness – which after 9/11 was directed almost exclusively at what she described in vivid, often angry, prose as the threat posed by radical Islam to Western values and the suicidal indifference to that threat on the part of Western elites, particularly those in Europe.

Fallaci was always a fighter; raised in an anti-Fascist family, her father was a leader in the underground battle against Mussolini and she herself was involved at a young age in the Resistance. Although for decades as a journalist her worldview was decidedly left wing and shot through with an abiding cynicism toward the U.S., her thinking underwent a swift evolution with the rise of jihadism.

Her book The Rage and the Pride, published in Italy just months after the 9/11 attacks and in the U.S. in September 2002, unabashedly celebrated the United States as a bastion of freedom even as it acknowledged the country’s “flaws and mistakes and faults.”

In a follow-up book, The Force of Reason, published in the U.S. a few months before she passed away, she detailed the legal attacks – Muslim groups in France and Italy filed lawsuits against her and called for a ban of The Rage and the Pride while the Swiss government asked that she be extradited to stand trial for incitement – and the death threats that had come her way since she’d begun writing on Islam.

In The Force of Reason she stated that Islam “sows hatred in place of love and slavery in place of freedom” – a choice of words that reflected the tone of her writing in her final years and that led critics to slam her for what they said was a blanket condemnation of all Muslims.

Although Fallaci was for decades decidedly pro-Palestinian, she painted a wholly unflattering picture of Yasir Arafat after interviewing him in 1972.

“He was…five feet three, I’d say. And even his hands were small, even his feet. Too small, you thought, to sustain his fat legs and his massive trunk, with its huge hips and swollen, obese stomach.”

When he spoke, “His voice had a kind of funny whistle in it. And something feminine.”

But when Arafat got angry, “his soft voice becomes a loud one, his eyes become pools of hatred, and he looks as though he would like to tear you to pieces along with all his enemies.”

Under Fallaci’s prodding, Arafat inadvertently exposed the shifty parameters of the then-still nascent myth of Palestinian nationhood.

Fallaci: But what does Palestine mean?…The Turks were here, before the British Mandate and Israel. So what are the geographical borders of Palestine?

Arafat:…. From an Arab point of view, one doesn’t speak of borders; Palestine is a small dot in the great Arabic ocean. And our nation is the Arab one, it is a nation extending from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and beyond….

When Fallaci continued to press him on the matter of borders, a flustered Arafat reiterated: “I repeat that borders have no importance. Arab unity is important, that’s all.”

In April 2002, Fallaci publicly repudiated her longtime (and largely uncritical and unquestioning) support for the Palestinian cause in a scorching essay on anti-Semitism.

As the journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber described it, “Repeating over and over the assertion ‘I find it shameful,’ Fallaci unleashed a brutal indictment of Italy, Italians, the Catholic church, the left wing, the media, politically correct pacifists and Europeans in general for abandoning Israel and fomenting a new wave of anti-Semitism linked to the Mideast crisis.”

In Fallaci’s memorable words, she was “disgusted with the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans” and “ashamed of this shame that dishonors my country and Europe.”

“I find it shameful,” she wrote, “and I see in all this the resurgence of a new fascism, a new Nazism.”

Acknowledging that in the past “I fought often, and bitterly, with the Israelis, and I defended the Palestinians a lot – maybe more than they deserved,” Fallaci was characteristically unambiguous about where she now stood:

“…I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews,” she wrote. “I defend their right to exist, to defend themselves, and not to allow themselves to be exterminated a second time.”

In an interview published shortly before her death, Fallaci drew the battle lines for what she viewed as an escalating war between the West and an enemy all too similar to the Fascists her family fought in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“I am convinced,” she told The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot, “that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing.

“With the Muslims, we have done the same thing…. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.

“Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

I agree with Cornel West.

I never thought I would find myself writing those words.

West, a leading African-American author and intellectual, is a vicious critic of Israel. He supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He says Israel’s leaders are “war criminals.” In a speech at Princeton last year, he made the wildly absurd claim that the Israelis “are killing hundreds [of Palestinians] daily.”

But even a broken clock gives the right time twice a day, so on the rare occasion that West utters words of truth about the Palestinians or Israel, I must acknowledge that.

West was appointed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to serve on the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee. He lobbied hard for a platform plank supporting the Palestinian cause, and was partly successful.

Speaking to a Jerusalem Post reporter on July 26 on the floor of the Democratic Convention, West said that he was disappointed the platform did not go further, but he vowed to continue his struggle. He declared: “The Palestinians will be free, brother. Ain’t no doubt about that.”

And that’s where Cornel and I agree.

Since 1995, more than 98 percent of the Palestinians have been living under the occupation of the Palestinian Authority, and, since 2007, 100 percent of the residents of Gaza have been living under the occupation of Hamas.

To paraphrase West with a slight twist: Ain’t no doubt in my mind: one day, brother, the Palestinians will be free of the cruel totalitarian Palestinian regimes that occupy and oppress them.

One day, brother, the Palestinians will have the freedom to democratically choose their leaders. Mahmoud Abbas was elected head of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005 for a four-year term. Yet somehow he is still in office, seven and a half years since his term expired. And Hamas has not held a democratic election since taking over the Gaza Strip nine years ago.

One day, brother, the Palestinians will have the right to freedom of speech. Najat Abu Baker, a member of the Palestinian parliament, recently hid out in the parliament building for seventeen days to avoid being arrested by the PA police. The warrant for arrest was issued because – as The New York Times put it – “Ms. Abu Baker said Mr. Abbas should resign and suggested that there would be money to pay educators if ministers were not so corrupt.”

One day, brother, the Palestinians will have the right to free assembly. Earlier this year, 20,000 Palestinian public school teachers went on strike because they had not been paid (those were the unpaid educators to whom Ms. Abu Baker was referring). When some dissidents tried to hold a rally in support of the strikers, “the PA security services set up rings of checkpoints to prevent the teachers from attending the demonstration,” according to Haaretz. Twenty teachers and two school principals who did manage to reach the rally were arrested for doing so.

One day, brother, the Palestinians will no longer have their basic human rights violated by the Palestinian occupation regime. According to the State Department’s most recent report on human rights around the world, the PA is guilty of “abuse and mistreatment of detainees, poor and overcrowded detention facilities, prolonged detention, and infringements on privacy rights;” “restrictions on freedom of speech, press, and assembly;” “limits on freedom of association and movement;” “discrimination against persons with disabilities” “discrimination based on sexual orientation and HIV/AIDS status;” and “limits on worker rights ” including “forced labor.”

So I agree with Cornel West: one day, the Palestinians will be free. The question, though, is how long it will take West to acknowledge just whom the Palestinians need to be liberated from.

{Originally posted to the IPT website}

The mass rape of hundreds of German women mostly by Muslim migrants last New Year’s was recently revealed to be far worse than originally acknowledged. Authorities now believe that more than 1,200 women were sexually assaulted – over twice the original estimate of 500. While more than 2,000 men were allegedly involved, only 120 suspects — about half of them recently arrived migrants — have been identified.

One explanation for why it took half a year for the full extent of the crime to be revealed is the German police’s effort to avoid a public backlash against refugees. But ultimately, Holger Munch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, acknowledged to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that there is “a connection between the [sexual assaults] and the rapid migration in 2015.”

Denial is not a strategy. Western countries that cherish women’s rights must wake up to the fact that many migrants could challenge those values. Most of the mass migration comes from violence-plagued, Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where women are second-class citizens subject to honor killings and various legal restrictions, and where the local culture often condones rape, encourages wife-beating, and treats women as sexual objects (with 72 virgins promised to Muslim men who reach heaven).

Thus, just as the mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa raises the specter of regular Islamist terror on European soil, it also augurs the kind of sexual abuse that those regions have traditionally tolerated. German officials implicitly seemed to acknowledge as much with their laughably impotent campaign to re-educate migrants using signs that explain acceptable behavior towards women.

Non-Muslim (“infidel”) women are especially vulnerable to sexual assault: Christian women are often abused and denigrated in Islamic societies, as extensively exposed by Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again. The Islamic State (ISIS) regards the Yazidi, another religious minority, as devil worshippers and reportedly enslaved up to 5,000 Yazidi women, subjecting them to rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality, like burning alive a 20-year-old girl “because she refused to perform an extreme sex act.”

Saudi Arabia, arguably the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, has a legal system based on strict sharia law, which prohibits women from dressing as they wish or even driving a car. Saudi rulings are notoriously abysmal when it comes to rape. Last year, a Saudi woman was sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang raped by seven men. In 2013, a Saudi preacher who raped, tortured, and murdered his 5-year old daughter was punished with just eight years of prison, 800 lashes, and a $270,000 fine. With such legal norms, it’s not surprising that when members of the country’s ruling elite travel to the West, their behavior may not change accordingly (last October three women accused a Saudi prince of sexual assault in Beverly Hills). By ironic and tragic contrast, U.S. soldiers stationed in Muslim majority countries are trained to respect local norms to the point that marines stationed in Afghanistan were actually taught to look away if they find Afghanis raping children, a common local practice.

While sharia advocates often claim that the Islamic dress code protects women, the brutally unfair treatment of women by Islamists seems driven more by power-hungry male chauvinism and/or sexual insecurity than by any genuine concern for women’s welfare, judging from the staggering hypocrisy of its proudest proponents. The 9/11 jihadists visited strip clubs, and paid for prostitutes in their motel rooms. Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born imam whose sermons continue to attract recruits to jihad, frequented prostitutes. Osama bin Laden had an extensive pornography collection, and is among the many examples of jihadis obsessed with porn and prostitution collected by Phyllis Chesler, a CUNY emerita professor of psychology and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Between 1997 and 2013, well before the recent mass migration to Europe began, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham, England, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.

While that scandal involved mostly “white” victims, an Oxford-educated Pakistani-British woman revealed her own exploitation, noting that “sexual abuse has been systemically under-reported among Asian girls due to deeply entrenched cultural taboos – obscuring the reality that there is a similarly rampant problem of minority girls being abused by members of their own community.”

A few weeks ago, Swedish police received 35 complaints from girls aged 12 to 17 who claimed that “foreign young men” sexually assaulted them at a popular music festival.

Soeren Kern, a distinguished senior fellow of the Gatestone Institute, compiled details of dozens of sexual assaults by migrants in Germany during the first two months of 2016, and noted the enabling reaction from “the upside-down worldview of German multiculturalism: Migrants who assault German women and children are simply rebelling against German power structures. Germans who dare to criticize such assaults are racists.”

In contrast to the initial cover-up by German police of the mass rape by mostly Muslim migrants, France’s top security official recently spoke with candid alarm about the threat that his country faces. Just two days before the truck-ramming, ISIS-inspired massacre in Nice, Patrick Calvar, chief of the Directorate General of Internal Security, warned members of the French parliamentary commission that France is on the verge of a “civil war” that could be sparked by the mass sexual assault of women by migrants.

There are remarkable exceptions within Islam itself, such as the Tuareg, an Islamic tribe in Africa, where women embrace sexual freedoms, dictate who gets what in divorce, and don’t wear the veil because men “want to see their beautiful faces.” But how long can the Tuareg’s enlightened version of Islam survive in southwest Libya when ISIS is expanding there, or in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram is on the march?

There are also brave Muslim reformers trying to improve the way Islam treats women. However, they mostly operate in the West, where they still face death threats; one example is Irshad Manji. Another, Fadela Amara, founded Ni Putes Ni Soumises, a group that defends Muslim French girls against the pressures they face to wear the hijab, drop out of school, and marry early without the right to choose their husband. Amara went on to serve in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, but she, too, received death threats for her efforts to liberate Muslim women.

Muslim feminists outside of the West assume far greater risks. Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel ‎Baloch, who openly expressed her feminist views online, was recently strangled to death by her brother in their family’s home, in an “honor killing.” Her “intolerable behavior” is what drove him to murder her, he said, because her risqué persona was bringing “dishonor” to the family. There are an estimated 1,000 honor killings per year in Pakistan.

Even in the West, few feminists dare to criticize Islam because doing so can invite threats and violence. Absurdly, those brave enough to do so also risk being prosecuted for “hate speech.”

Western countries must support courageous Muslim reformers while protecting all women living in their territories from the sexual abuse often encouraged by Islamist culture – whether that abuse is perpetrated by recent immigrants or long-time residents. The survival of the West depends on it.

{Originally posted to the Gatestone Institute website}

Omar Mateen did not choose the Pulse gay nightclub because it had few security guards or because it was an easy target. He could have targeted a supermarket or a school. No, Mateen chose Pulse because it is a nightclub, where he slaughtered 49 “infidels” and wounded 53 more.

Before murdering 2,977 people, the leader of the 9/11 terrorists, Mohammed Atta, along with four of the other hijackers, made several trips to Las Vegas during the summer before the attack, where they were entertained by dancers in nightclubs.

Fifteen years later, there was another country, another jihadist cell, another nightclub. Salah Abdeslam was dancing in a nightclub in Brussels with his brother, Brahim, and flirting with a blonde woman. A few months later, Brahim blew himself up in Paris at a concert in the Bataclan Theater. Nightclubs haunt the Islamist imagination with their mix of alcohol, sexual promiscuity, drugs and music. ISIS labelled Paris “the capital of prostitution and obscenity.”

The London nightclub Tiger Tiger, located between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, was the target of a terror plot in 2007. Last February, the French intelligence service foiled a plot to attack swingers’ clubs in Paris. Places such as Les Chandelles, which boasts a “fascinating journey into the heart of sensuality,” or the Overside, which offers 250 square meters “dedicated to pleasure.”

The most spectacular and bloody of these attacks at nightclubs took place in Bali, Indonesia, in 2002: 190 victims, mostly Western tourists, Australian surfers and girls in bikinis.

In 2008, Islamists attacked the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, which they used to call “the den of Western decadence.” Like the nightclubs, the hotels are ideological targets, places where men and women freely mix and guests can consume alcohol and enjoy music.

In July 2005, at least 88 people were killed by terrorists storming Sharm el Sheikh, the tiny Egyptian seaside village transformed by Hosni Mubarak into a global attraction for foreign tourism. In 2015, ISIS butchered British tourists on a beach in Sousse, Tunisia.

“We desire death more than you desire life,” these Islamist terrorists have been telling us for the last twenty years. It seems they want to achieve a catharsis by spilling blood in our comfortable promiscuity, in the dark of a nightclub.

Senior Hamas official Fathi Hamad, addressing Israel, has said the same thing. Major Nidal Malik Hasan wrote, “We love death more than you love life” before murdering 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. “We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, along with Osama bin Laden and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The West, however, should be proud of what the Islamists call “decadence.” For the West, “decadence” is synonymous with freedom. The problem is that we postmodern Westerners have sacrificed the very values that ensure our survival and exchanged them for “decadence” — pleasure. That is why Pim Fortuyn, the openly gay sociology professor and politician murdered in 2002, scorned Islam as a “backward culture” (an animal rights activist killed Fortuyn “to protect Muslims“). Fortuyn fought on behalf of what Islamists would consider “decadence,” and he regarded permissiveness as the great glory of Western civilization.

The problem is that the West does not desire life. It seems tired of it. You can see that from the post-Orlando reactions which cannot even mention the word “Islam.” The West is ready to surrender its love of life to those who want to take it away from them. To quote the French atheist philosopher, Michel Onfray:

“Islam manifests what Nietzsche called ‘great health’: there are young soldiers ready to die for it. What are the values of our civilization? Supermarket and e-commerce, trivial consumerism and egotistical narcissism, vulgar hedonism or scooters for adults?”

Pleasure has become sad in the West.

In a fever of moralistic prudery, Italy recently veiled naked art at the Capitoline Museums in Rome during the visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. But we obligate other Muslims who arrive in Europe to see far more explicit naked images.

From Norway to Denmark, the Scandinavian nations have adopted compulsory sex education for migrants. In the Netherlands, the minister of education decided to impose the teaching of LGBT courses in migrant centers. Germany has published guidelines, leaflets and cartoons to communicate to immigrants the new sexual norms to follow. Is that all we have to offer to these people?

“The morally illiterate leaflets European local authorities are distributing to migrants reflect the problems that official EU culture has in the realm of values,” wrote sociologist Frank Furedi. Europe already tried to integrate Muslims by offering them wantonness and libertinism. And it failed. Asked what drove them to convert to Islam, many Europeans talked of feeling their lives had been lost and lacking in purpose, citing “lack of morality and sexual permissiveness“.

The “clash of civilizations” has turned into a war between those who cry, “We will not give up our lifestyle” and those who sing, “We desire death more than you desire life.” It is a war between a decadent apathy with moral inertia and Islamist theological turmoil. The Caliphate is much stronger than our disarmed and self-righteous decadence.

ISIS’s black banner, crying “No God but Allah” — the banner of the people who kill cartoonists in Paris and gays in Orlando — is marching over the ruins of our addiction to pleasure.

Remarkably, despite the severe plunge in tourism Turkey has been experiencing for several years, with millions fewer tourists from Germany, Austria, the UK, Israel and more recently Russia making Turkey their vacation destination, air traffic in and out of Turkey remains massive. This is due to a decision made by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to turn Turkey into the world’s international hub. The country’s location, one part in Asia, the other part in Europe, made this a logical and rewarding move.

There are two international airports in Istanbul: Ataturk, which is about fifteen minutes from downtown Istanbul, and Sabiha Gökçen, on the Asian side, which is about half an hour from downtown. Ataturk, with 60 million passengers a year, is the third largest airport in Europe, and the Turks are already working on a third international airport, to help manage the traffic.

Cognizant of the security threats to commercial traffic in the region, Turkey has invested a tremendous amount of resources in securing both international airports, with several security circles, Walla reported Wednesday. The airports are surrounded by security fences, at the main vehicle entrance there is a police check post, and at the entrance to each terminal the suitcases go through an x-ray scan, while each passenger must go through a metal detector. After the check-in the passenger goes through another metal detector and their luggage is x-rayed. On flights to Israel and the US passengers are also checked before entering the plane.

According to Walla, despite what appears like standard security checks which are familiar to anyone flying in the US, Turkish airports share several weak spots. For one thing, modern airport security systems, like the one in Israel, operate three separate circles which are run separate from one another: a circle securing the airport; a circle for the flight security; and a circle for securing the flight path.

In Istanbul airports, those circles are indistinguishable from one another, creating needless lines at the various check points, and compromising both the airport and the individual planes’ security. Also, there are no snipers situated in strategic locations, ready to take out potential attackers.

But the problem begins earlier, at the bus service hauling passengers from downtown Istanbul to the airport. Those buses don’t check their passengers, and they pass through to the terminal doors without an inspection.

Ataturk’s problems are similar to those of the Brussels airport where terrorists managed to blow themselves up with horrendous casualties last March. Both airports concede parts of the terminal to potential terrorists, where passengers move in and out unobserved.

Walla has speculated that one immediate benefit to the Turks from the thaw of their relations with Israel would be to seek Israeli assistance in setting their security systems straight.

{Originally posted to the Toronto Sun}

Almost 10 years ago, Maclean’s magazine published an essay by Mark Steyn titled, “The future belongs to Islam”.

In it, he suggested, “the West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it.”

It was an extract from Steyn’s then best-selling book America Alone, where he concluded, “It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it.”

Steyn wrote: “We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly.”

There was an outcry among Canada’s Islamists, who took Steyn and Maclean’s to the Ontario and British Columbia Human Rights Commissions.

My fellow Sun columnist, Farzana Hassan, and I wrote a rejoinder in Maclean’s titled, “Mark Steyn has a right to be wrong.”

Today, I recognize, Steyn was right and I was wrong.

If there were any doubts the West is abdicating its responsibility to stand up for Western values, the amateur attempts by the FBI to cover up the Islamist nature of the Orlando attack, removed them.

At first, the FBI refused to even mention the fact the Orlando jihadi was inspired by ISIS, but after criticism, released the text of his 911 calls, but not the audio.

It replaced the word “Allah” with “‘God”, despite knowing precise words matter in truth-telling.

It was clearly an attempt to make the attack appear homophobic, not Islamist.

President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton deflected attention from the obvious Islamic nature of the terrorism to a debate about gun control.

An FBI spokesman did the same when he downplayed the role of Islamism in the attack, editorializing that the killer, “does not represent the religion of Islam, but a perverted view, which based on what we know today, was inspired by extremist killers.”

In Toronto, Premier Kathleen Wynne, Canada’s first openly gay premier, also refused to address the Islamist nature of the attack, saying, “one cannot fight homophobia with Islamphobia”, at a vigil for the Orlando victims.

This is nonsense. Orlando was an act of Islamic terror and of Islamofascism, a doctrine of hatred towards the West and what it stands for, including LGBTQ rights.

It holds secular liberal democracy in contempt, hates non-Muslims, degrades women and is racist towards non-Arabs, especially black Africans.

It is a supremacist death cult that has the end times as its ultimate goal.

Chia Barsen, a 32-year old Canadian Marxist, was 10 when his family fled Islamic Iran, political refugees escaping the murderous rule of its barbaric ayatollahs.

Commenting on the liberal left’s reaction to the Oralando massacre, Barsen wrote on his blog:

“Blaming guns for the Islamist murder of 49 people in the Orlando gay club, is like saying that Zyklon B gas was the cause of the Holocausts and not the Nazis. Gun control is a clear and present issue in the U.S. and there are countless episodes of shootings in the U.S. to justify the removal of all guns (not just automatic weapons), from the streets.

“However, piggybacking on the gun control debate and not making any mention of the threat of Political Islam and Islamism, is the furthering of a political agenda and not simple ignorance or apathy.” Exactly.

An American lawyer who previously advised the Palestinian Authority on negotiations with Israel now says that the West cannot defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) and should accept it as an “ugly reality.”

John V. Whitbeck, who previously has written that the 9/11 attacks probably were an “inside job,” wrote his latest thesis Saturday in the Palestinian Authority-based Ma’an News Agency, which noted that it does not necessarily represent the views of the website that is frequently quoted by foreign news sources.

He wrote that the ISIS massacres in France earlier this month “have not changed the priorities of the other states that might be concerned.”

The United States and Britain’s top priority is Syria, where Whitbeck asserts that the United States and Britain are primarily interested in “keeping Russia down, and keeping the Sunni Gulf states happy.”

He also thinks that many Sunni Muslims under the “harsh, austere and often savagely brutal rule” of ISIS actually prefer it to being under the aegis of “what are widely perceived by Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis to be Shiite-dominated or even Iranian-dominated governments.”

As for defeating the ISIS, Whitbeck says that the West has no chance. He wrote that bombing the terrorists is not successful and that sending “boots on the ground would be an avidly sought boon to the Islamic State…since the Sunni states of the region… currently show no interest whatsoever in deploying their own ground forces against fellow Sunnis.”

Here is his advice to President Barack Obama and other Western leaders:

Relax, accept that the Islamic State is an ugly reality that is here to stay (at least for some considerable time).

They should accept that containment is the best that can hoped for and achieved in the near term, and that containment can best be achieved by the Iraqi and Syrian governments and their own military forces.

They should sit back and wait for the Islamic State’s aura of excitement to wear off, for it to become a failed state like so many other regional states in which the West has previously intervened and for the peoples of the region to sort out their own problems in their own way.

He admits that it would be “desirable” for ISIS to disappear but that it cannot be done by force without Sunni Muslim countries sending in soldiers and that it won’t happen so long as the West claims “ownership” of the war.