By Bradley Dick ’16, Contributor
While the President has been trying to normalize relations with dictators in Cuba and Iran in the last few months, ISIS and Boko Haram have been marching through Africa and the Middle East seemingly uncontested.
The most recent attacks outside of a synagogue in Copenhagen and the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Egypt by ISIS serve as sad reminders that the War on Terror is far from finished and no page has been turned. Instead, these attacks remind most of us that this is more than a single decade’s long conflict, but rather a generational long struggle to ensure our ideals- individual liberty, free markets, and democracy– win out over radical extremism.
The President along with many others in his administration view one of the first steps in responding to and thwarting these attacks as figuring how to refer to these terrorists and the usage of the word Islam in their name. Rather than focusing on what to call them, the administration should call them what they are: Islamic extremists and then move on to the next step.
Only when the President and his administration get over this, perhaps the U.S. can respond militarily and actually thwart future extremist attacks along with preventing the spread of extremism.
This is a concept that Francois Hollande, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Angela Merkel and King of Jordan have already realized and began acting upon. It should come as no surprise to Americans that this administration has yet to understand this concept since they failed to join those and other world leaders and nations at the unity rally after the Charlie Hebdo attacks a month ago at the Place de la Nation in Paris.
This absence of American leadership on the world stage sends a message that not only does the administration have no response but also that it’s unwilling to help other western nations come up with responses of their own.
This failure to respond with effective military action or any real action isn’t and hasn’t been overstated. It’s this failure that has let Boko Haram take over 20,000 plus square miles (roughly the size of Belgium) of territory in Africa. This failure has also left over 11,000 innocent civilians in 2014 alone dead. However the President and his administration did tweet a picture of first lady Michelle Obama with #BringBackOurGirls.
When ISIS murdered 21 Coptic Christians, a Jordanian pilot and Japanese and American journalist, Egypt not only stood up for their own citizens but also the citizens of the world by conducting airstrikes on ISIS targets in Libya. Letting ISIS and other extremist groups know that terrorism in any form should and will be met by military action will help push back ISIS’ stronghold that is knocking on the doors of Europe.
Along with Egypt’s response was Jordan’s execution of terrorists known to be in accordance with ISIS in response to the execution of a Jordanian fighter pilot.
Egypt and Jordan have taken the actions to see that ISIS doesn’t achieve their goal of taking over as much territory as they can between Morocco and Afghanistan to enforce Sharia Law. The United States along with other powerful nations should be taking the actions that Egypt and Jordan have already been taking not only in Libya and northern Africa but also in the Middle East.
The United States owes it to the family members of those who have been killed by extremism along with the Christian and Jewish citizens around the world who are continually being targeted. Rather than making grand pronouncements but never acting upon them (red lines), the United States and the Obama Administration need to take action — be that airstrikes and, if necessary, the deployment of ground troops — to thwart the jihadist threat.
