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ISIS Warns Obama, Beheads Sotloff
by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700
Copyright
September 3, 2014
All Rights Reserved.
Speaking directly
into the camera to President Barack Obama with knife in hand, the same Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria masked assassin that beheaded 40-year-old
photojournalist James Foley Aug. 19, decapitated 31-year-old freelance
journalist Stephen Sotloff Sept. 2.
Meeting in Talinn, Estonia, Obama told the press that those that harm American
citizens will face the long arm of American justice. ISIS’s knife-wielding terrorist
spoke in a British accent of more beheadings. He urged Obama to halt his
targeted bombing of ISIS begun Aug. 7 to stop the ISIS genocide of Iraq’s
ancient Yazidi population. While
steering away from Mideast wars for the first five-and-a-half years of his
presidency, Obama had to get off the fence to deal with the runaway ISIS
terrorist threat in Iraq and Syria.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill asked Obama for an urgent
plan to stop ISIS.
Whatever has to eventually happen politically in the Mideast to stop
roving Islamic gangs like ISIS, the U.S. can’t afford to wait for more favorable
political and economic conditions.
Watching ISIS behead American citizens told Obama that he must do something
about the mafia-like mass-killing machine that’s seized 30% of Iraq and Syria.. Orchestrated from an unknown bunker
much like Osama bin Laden ran his al-Qaeda terror organization, 44-year-old
Iraqi-born Abu Bakr all-Baghdadi runs ISIS like an efficient covert military
killing machine. Running the group
from the shadows, al-Baghdadi, unlike Bin Laden, rarely makes video appearances
spouting off clever slogans of the Islamic revolution. Al-Baghdadi stays behind the scenes
watching the mayhem and mass murder, only recently claiming the massacre of over
700 Iraqi troops near Saddam Hussein’s birthplace of Tikrit.
Al-Baghdadi’s learned well from his mentor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, once Bin
Laden’s handpicked man to run al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Al-Zarqawi met his unceremonious end with a 500-pound U.S. smart bomb
June 7, 2006, not before murdering countless American and coalition troops,
stringing U.S. corpses up on a bridge over the Euphrates during the battle of
Fallujah. No terrorist was
more violent than Zarqawi, at least until al-Baghdadi took over ISIS May 16,
2013 after its two leaders Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi were
killed by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Tikrit.
Competing in Iraq and Syria, al-Baghdadi severed ties with al-Qaeda in
February 2014. Since then, he’s
orchestrated the biggest land-grab since the Nazi blitzkriegs before WW II. On Obama’s watch, ISIS has far eclipsed al-Qaeda as the world’s most dangerous and
violent terror organization.
However one criticizes Obama for his slow start, the rest of his
presidency will be marked by his progress “rolling back” ISIS, as Secretary of
State John Kerry likes to say. For
the first time since Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
March 23, 2010, there’s a growing consensus in Congress to back Obama on
neutralizing ISIS. “Everyone agrees
that the administration needs a strategy, that the president has to explain to
the American people and explain to Congress how we are going to meet this
threat,” said House Foreign Affairs Chairman Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.). Promising to follow ISIS terrorists
“to the gates of hell,” Vice President Joe Biden echoed the new White House
strategy at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine. Biden’s public remarks signal that
the administration is poised to go on the offensive to reverse the growing ISIS
threat—with or without allies.
ISIS got Obama’s attention with the barbaric beheadings of two American
journalists. “I’m back Obama, and
I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State,”
taunted the British-sounding masked militant before severing Sotloff’s head. Instead of spewing platitudes like
Bin Laden, ISIS prefers to speak directly to world powers, threatening more
beheadings. Called “A Second
Message to America,” ISIS has galvanized a divided Congress to back an
aggressive approach to neutralizing the violent terror group. “We are shocked and deeply saddened by reports of Steven Sotloff’s death,” said Time
Magazine Editor Nancy Gibbs, not acknowledging extreme risks to reporters
covering terrorist hotbeds like Iraq and Syria.
After watching Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl beheaded Feb 1,
2012 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan, Sotloff knew the risks.
In-your-face news of Foley and Sotloff’s beheadings got Obama’s
attention, causing him to pivot abruptly in his Mideast policy. While lending support to NATO
visiting Talinn, Estonia and Cardiff, Wales regarding Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s actions in Ukraine, Obama knows there’s little the U.S. can do there. Taking the battle to ISIS in Iraq
and Syria offers a far safer intervention than challenging Putin in Ukraine. With 70-year-old former Polish President and Nobel laureate Lech Walesa warning Europe
about a nuclear confrontation in Ukraine, there’s little Obama can do other than
more economic sanctions. Going after ISIS in Iraq and Syria should help restore some lost U.S. credibility. No European country looks poised to
neutralize ISIS other than the U.S. All the bluster about Putin in Europe, the EU isn’t prepared to do much other than blow
off hot air.
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