The Right Of Way

American Crusades and Existential Threats
Posted on February 27, 2015 by Ammoland
By Dr. Earl Tilford
“The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one.” –T.E. Lawrence

ISIS Killing Christians: Given their apocalyptic vision, if al Qaeda’s rapidly metastasizing franchises obtain weapons of mass destruction they will use them. The Center For Vision & Values

Grove City, PA –(Ammoland.com)- Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5 2015, President Barack Obama cautioned against judging recent barbaric attacks by ISIS as unique to Islam. He pointed to (among other things) depredations committed by Crusaders over 900 years ago.

Despite the blundering butchery by semi-barbarous European feudal armies, the medieval Crusades made strategic sense. After the fall of the Roman Empire and Western Europe’s descent into the Dark Ages, the Christian Byzantine Empire formed a protective shield against Muslim incursions into the Balkans and westward. In 1095, after Seljuk Turks overran much of the Byzantine Empire and occupied Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, Pope Urban II’s call for Crusades proved a historic turning point.

The day after Obama’s prayer breakfast lecture his national security advisor, Susan Rice, speaking at the Brookings Institute, previewed the White House’s 2015 National Security Policy by calling for “perspective” in addressing “dangerous … numerous and varied” threats which, according to her, “are not of an existential nature.” She then incorrectly cited World War II as one of the existential threats to the United States before correctly noting the Cold War presented such a threat.

America at arms excels in crusades fought to a definitive conclusion. There have been several such “crusades” in American history and three existential threats.

The fight for independence from Britain constituted a struggle for existence that, had the patriots lost, would have aborted the American republic. After a long, hard struggle the patriots prevailed; failure would have meant the gallows. From the patriots’ perspective theirs was a war for survival against formidable odds fought to a definitive conclusion. While not a “crusade,” it was a desperate fight. For the British, not so much—and they lost.

The American Civil War posed an existential threat not because the Confederacy wanted to conquer the Union but because its success would have destroyed the Union. It was a closely run thing but in the end, the Union embarked on a two-edged crusade to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” says a lot about President Abraham Lincoln’s determination and Washington’s war aims. While Gen. Ulysses S. Grant destroyed Confederate armies, Gen. William T. Sherman undertook offensives in Alabama and Georgia that sacked farms and destroyed industries to collapse the South’s already weak economy. The Union crusade preserved the United States of America.

The Second World War, too, was an American crusade although Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Italy never posed an existential threat to the United States. Japan sought to compel the United States to withdraw from the western Pacific. While a victorious Nazi Germany would have imposed a barbaric new “Dark Age” on Europe, in the 1940s the Nazis could not threaten the existence of the United States. Nevertheless, President Franklin D. Roosevelt mounted a crusade to save civilization that the American military pursued to a definitive conclusion. Japan and the European fascist powers suffered the same fate as the Confederacy: defeated armies, wrecked economies, devastated cities, disestablished political systems, and their countries occupied during political reconstruction.

The Cold War, however, posed an existential threat. Marxist ideology fostered a showdown between two incompatible socio-economic systems. The Cold War mobilized America’s industrial, scientific and academic communities. Although the nation was drawn into two indecisive conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, the overarching Cold War paradigm involved a struggle between antithetical systems only one of which could survive. In the end, the genius of President Ronald Reagan was to label the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire” and undertake the largest peacetime military buildup in American history coupled with his strategic defense initiative—“Star Wars.” The overregulated and inept Soviet economy collapsed along with its ideologically bankrupted Marxist political system. Although Russia survived and will challenge the West again, because of Ronald Reagan millions of East Europeans were freed from political servitude. A crusading America makes for an awesome adversary.

The Obama administration’s refusal to recognize the existential nature of the threat posed by Islamic fanaticism does not make that threat less real. Given their apocalyptic vision, if al Qaeda’s rapidly metastasizing franchises obtain weapons of mass destruction they will use them. ISIS computer specialists demonstrated remarkable information age capabilities in their 22-minute Internet presentation culminating in the live immolation of Jordanian Air Force Lt. Moaz al Kasasbeh. The nature of cyber warfare is that savvy hackers can wreak catastrophic damage. This existential threat is real. Given the fanatical commitment driving this threat, efforts to “decimate and contain” will fail.

What’s needed is an American-led crusade to attack and annihilate al Qaeda and its ISIS franchise.

— Dr. Earl Tilford is a military historian and fellow for the Middle East & terrorism with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. He currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he is writing a history of the University of Alabama in the 1960s. A retired Air Force intelligence officer, Dr. Tilford earned his PhD in American and European military history at George Washington University. From 1993 to 2001, he served as Director of Research at the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute. In 2001, he left Government service for a professorship at Grove City College, where he taught courses in military history, national security, and international and domestic terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Read more: http://www.ammoland.com/2015/02/american-crusades-and-existential-threats/#ixzz3T2eUQtfk
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What George Washington said about ‘ISIS’
Exclusive: David Barton counters notion religious beliefs have nothing to do with terror
Published: 12 hours ago
David Barton About | Email | Archive
David Barton is the founder and president of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization. He is also the author of numerous best-selling books, with the subjects being drawn largely from his massive library of tens of thousands of original writings from the Founding Era. His exhaustive research has rendered him an expert in historical and constitutional issues, and he serves as a consultant to state and federal legislators, has participated in several cases at the Supreme Court, was involved in the development of the History/Social Studies standards for states such as Texas and California, and has helped produce history textbooks now used in schools across the nation.
The Obama administration began last week with the assertion that the root cause for ISIS’ barbaric behavior was “its lack of opportunity for jobs.” President Obama ended the week claiming that ISIS’ allure for young people is that they “feel entirely trapped in impoverished communities … where there are no educational opportunities.” Nonsense. In fact, it is and has been just the opposite.
Olivier Roy, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, notes that even back in the 1970s and ’80s in “the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Refah in Turkey, the Islamic revolution in Iran – the actors [were] young, urban, educated people and people educated in the modern, Western system of education.” This is still true today. Thousands of youth are now joining ISIS by leaving schools in wealthy prosperous Western nations and choosing to go live instead in an impoverished desert region.
Why? According to an expert at Duke University, these young people (such the recent three British girls) “are responding to quite a deliberate call from the Islamic State to have women come and participate in a form of state-building and to make a new country in which they can practice their religion.” “Practice their religion.” It is religious beliefs, not economics or education, that is the common thread in ISIS’ growth.
If the Obama administration really wants to identify the root causes of ISIS’ outrageous behavior, it should start by reading documents already in its possession – such as the first reports filed on this subject from back in the 1780s.
At that time, America (along with other Western nations) was a victim of Muslim terrorist attacks being launched out of northern Africa and the Middle East. Seeking to solve the problem, in 1784 Congress dispatched John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to go meet with the Islamicists.

Adams and Jefferson candidly asked the Muslim ambassador the motivation behind the unprovoked attacks and then reported his answer to the State Department:
“The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet [Muhammad] – that it was written in their Quran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
William Eaton, similarly sent to negotiate with the Muslims, likewise reported:
“Taught by revelation that war with the Christians will guarantee the salvation of their souls, … their [the Muslims’] inducements to desperate fighting are very powerful.”
Based on what they learned, Jefferson identified the obvious solution:
“If we wish our commerce to be free and uninsulted [i.e., unattacked], we must let these nations see that we have an energy [willingness to use force], which at present they disbelieve. The low opinion they entertain of our powers cannot fail to involve us soon in a … war.”
George Washington agreed, affirming that what was needed was decisive military action that would “reform those enemies to mankind – or crush them into non-existence.”
Courageous leaders in the Middle East today follow George Washington’s advice much better than do our own leaders. Only two days after a Jordanian pilot was burned alive, Jordan’s King Abdullah personally led the retaliatory attacks against ISIS, and only one day after 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians were beheaded by ISIS, the Egyptian military pounded the terrorist group in Libya. While the Obama administration condemned that action, you can rest assured that ISIS will now think twice before executing more Jordanians or Egyptians. They would much rather select their victims from nations that talk and negotiate.
Finally – the truth about our third president and the rumors that have swirled about his beliefs and practices: Get David Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.”
Although State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf claimed that “we cannot win this war by killing them,” over the past several centuries this has been the means by which Western nations have successfully “reformed those enemies to mankind.” (The only other historical solution that has demonstrated any success is that of religious conversion, either from without or within – that is, either conversion to a different religion, or the remaking of the religion itself from within, such as with the reformation that long ago occurred in both Judaism and Christianity that moved its followers in a more socially-productive direction.)
Despite the Obama administration’s steadfast denial, the root of Islamic terrorist attacks is not economic disadvantage; it is religious beliefs. As Graeme Wood noted in his excellent report on ISIS, to ignore this obvious fact “reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.” So rather than following the Obama administration’s pattern of psychoanalyzing Muslim terrorists who tell us why they do what they do, we should instead just believe them.
After all, even modern Islamic leaders, scholars and Muslim apologists affirm that the current “slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition” but rather that the Islamic state “has an obligation to terrorize its enemies … with beheadings and crucifixions and enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.”
But the rabid secularism of the Obama administration causes it to reject religious explanations, regardless of the faith with which they are associated. Just as it dismissed out of hand the religious motivations on the part of Christians at Hobby Lobby, it similarly discounts the religious motivations of the Islamicists who comprise the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and other such groups. (By the way, it should be particularly disturbing to every American that the Obama administration deems itself qualified to be the judge of what is or is not a genuine religious belief, whether it is the Catholics on abortion or ISIS on barbarism.)
It is ludicrous for this administration – or any other – to try to talk Islamicists out of their religious beliefs by offering them economic assistance or jobs. Only a non-devout person can be bought off. Would Billy Graham change his beliefs and behavior if he were offered sufficient economic incentives? Would the Dali Lama? The chief rabbi of Jerusalem? The pope? Certainly not. Neither will the dedicated Islamicists of ISIS. America’s foreign-policy makers need to understand this millennia-old reality, which will never be the case with the unabashed secularists currently at the helm of this administration.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/what-george-washington-said-about-isis/#26scp6t2mdgorj99.99
A Nation of “SHEEP” breeds a Government of “WOLVES”