Mr. President, Iraqis Aren’t Safe From ISIS And Neither Are We

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS or ISIL, massacred at least 90 male members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority in a northern village and kidnapped “dozens” of women and children. President Obama, who claimed last week that U.S. airstrikes broke the Islamic militants hold on northern Iraq and halted their advance on minority communities, apparently spoke too early and gave Iraqi citizens a false sense of security.

Just one day after the president gave the American people, Iraqi citizens, and the world false assurances, the U.S. military was forced to conduct new airstrikes against the Islamic militants caught by surveillance drones carrying out the massacre.

“They arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon. We believe it’s because of their creed convert or be killed,” senior Kurdish official Hoshiyar Zebari said.

Well over 500 Yazidis have been murdered since ISIS first seized Sinjar. U.S. airstrikes are not enough to stop what many have characterized to now be a full-blown genocide. Pentagon officials say the U.S.-led airstrikes have only forced ISIS to seek cover underground, which only resulted in a shift in the terrorist army’s strategy.

Despite the president’s assurances, military analysts from Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters to Colonel William Hunt have all said there are only two ways to address the threat from the ISIS army. Either U.S. forces meet the ISIS with overwhelming force, or we acknowledge we are allowing Iraqis to die an unbearable death at the hands of a terrorist group that even Al Qaeda deemed to be too extreme, and have plans to turn their attention elsewhere.

However, the Iraqi citizens aren’t the only ones who took a false sense of security from the president’s words. There is bipartisan agreement that the security of the United States is threatened by ISIS, with the most recent threat coming from a young boy who ranted in a video that they want to “rip America in two.”

“I swear to Allah we will divide America in two,” the child, who looked no older than 12, declared to VICE Media in an angry rant. “And we’ll destroy the enemies of the religion all of them, all who fight the Islamic State.”

Apparently, when they aren’t using children to spew their hate-filled rhetoric, these disgusting individuals are cutting off their heads. These are monsters that neither know nor show any mercy. Meanwhile, the southern border of the United States is wide open, easily allowing these theocratic psychotics to slip through the cracks with a suitcase of fissile nuclear material they obtained from the University of Mosul after seizing Iraq’s second-largest city.

While it is understandable that Americans may not be inclined to take the word of a ranting child in a video thousands of miles away, they should be concerned about the tone of lawmakers sounding the alarm.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” last week that ISIS was a well-funded, well-oiled organization that is a “direct threat to our homeland.”

“Mr. President, be honest with the threat we face,” Graham said. “They are coming.”

Graham’s statements came after a Vice News video was released that shows an Islamic State militant saying, “We will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.” Nearly a decade and a half has passed since the tragic attack on September 11 2001, yet our compliancy has reverted back to pre-9/11 levels.

As someone who personally suffered a loss of loved-one that day and, constantly struggles to balance the reality of the Islamic threat against my skepticism toward interventionist policies, I do not favor a combination of foreign and immigration policies of disengagement that will result in catastrophes becoming a common occurrence. Losing a family member to Islamic extremism is not an experience I want to repeat again, let alone watch fellow-countryman experience.

We are not immunized against radical terrorists, and not immune to the horrific results spawned from their hate.