One of the more reality-free themes to come out of the story of the Islamic State’s growing strength and purposeful expansion in Libya and North Africa generally has been the frantic claims by European statesmen — especially those from Italy — that IS intends to use North Africa as a “gateway” to invade Europe. These hysterical fears have even moved the Italians to offer to lead a NATO intervention into Libya to defeat the Islamists. This is the same Italy, remember, that skedaddled from Iraq after a few of its soldiers were killed there by the Islamist fighters. One can only surmise that a Rome-led NATO invasion of Libya would go just fine so long as the invading force suffered no casualties.
The truth in this affair is that Italy and most of the other European countries long ago surrendered their internal security to a two-man Islamist force. The names of those two Islamist Goliaths are Abu Khalid bin Diversity and Abu Mukhtar al-Multiculturalism, those great shredders of the West’s social cohesion and internal security. The Europeans’ enraptured if lunatic love affair with the two Abu boys has opened the European continent to an enormous number of Muslim immigrants from across the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Some came to Europe as economic migrants truly searching for a better life, but many others came to escape the oppression and violence that Arab police states — Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Libya, etc. — routinely direct against their populations. In particular, many of those who came to Europe and were mindlessly granted resident or asylum status were men who had joined and/or fought in Islamist groups opposed to the tyrannical Arab governments which are — or were — among the most beloved allies of Europe and the United States. Addled by the theories of diversity and multicultural, Europe, in essence, welcomed as easily assimilated and soon-to-be loyal citizens those who had been persecuted by tyrants that Europe had long supported and armed. This approach to immigration, for those few Americans and Europeans still having a trace of commonsense, seems to present a prima facie case for a diagnosis of severe mental pathology.
By welcoming large numbers of Muslim men and their families who had been oppressed by Europe-supported Arab tyrants, European governments long ago established the beachhead and gateways for the entry into Europe of the Islamist movement’s vanguard, al-Qaeda, and now for the Islamic State (IS), which increasingly appears to be the jihad’s main force. Indeed, both al-Qaeda and IS command a force-in-being in Europe thanks to its governments unrelenting and suicidal allegiance to the policies of the two Abus. These forces are now quickly growing in numbers and military skill as many thousands of Europeans — born-Muslims and converts to Islam — travel overseas for military training and combat experience, and then return home patient and prepped for further combat. Europeans leaders need not worry that IS and al-Qaeda are setting up gateways to and beachheads in Europe because they themselves have been building them for decades. What they need to worry about is when they will be activated to produce insurgent warfare in Europe, as well as how their populations will react to that violence and to the governments that willingly and knowingly facilitated it.
With the policies of the Abus holding sway in Europe — or, rather, enslaving the European mind — one more piece needed to fall into place to ensure the Islamists could carry their jihad easily into Europe. In a move that makes one to think that Allah may well be on the side of the mujahideen, the Marx Brothers of contemporary international affairs — Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Nicholas Sarkozy — militarily intervened in Libya and eliminated Gadhafi and his regime. (NB: No offense is intended to the endlessly creative Marx Brothers. Their just-noted and highly educated successors may produce more antics and mayhem, but they are attended only with stupidity, tragedy, and death, never intelligence, mirth, and joy.) The three leaders thereby destroyed one of the West’s more important Arab counter-terrorism assets and gave — as time will surely show — all of North Africa and the Sahel states to the Islamists, as well as a Mediterranean coastline stretching from Egypt to Morocco from which to smuggle fighters and weapons into Europe at a thousand different points and at times of their own choosing.
For the Islamist movement, all’s well that ends well — and in the Islamist’s North African theater things could have not gone much better. And when the mujahideen entrench themselves and dominate North Africa and the Sahel and then begin an insurgency in Europe, the new Marx Brothers — with Hollande replacing Sarkozy — will tell the soldiers they send to fight them that they are fighting and dying for such unobtainable abstractions as freedom, liberty, democracy, and women’s and human rights for Muslims. That is, of course, precisely what the U.S. and NATO militaries were told when they were sent to fight and die in the Afghan and Iraq wars that their nation’s leaders never had any intention of winning.
How much more honest and precise it would be if today’s Marx Brothers used the estimable Groucho’s words and told each man and woman in their militaries sent to fight the Islamists that “You’re a brave man (or woman). Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you’re out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we’ll be in be in here thinking what a sucker you are.”
As Groucho surely knew, and we in the West must begin to recall, there is never a justification for war based on the Western elite’s self-satisfying fervor to obtain abstract goals for foreigners. Foreign policy and war must only be about protecting life-and-death national interests. Going to war to install abroad such abstractions as democracy and human rights clearly reveals U.S. presidents and European prime ministers as the murderers of each soldier sent to fight the Islamists, men and women who are, again in Groucho’s words, risking “life and limb through shot and shell.”