Jihadi terrorists like lots of dead bodies. And they exploit the dead on both sides for their cruel ends.
The widespread publicity about ISIS’s atrocities and slave markets wasn’t intended only to terrify enemies. It was intended to inspire potential recruits and supporters. We are winners, their recruiters say to disaffected youth around the world. Join us to kill your enemies and take their women as slaves even as you serve and please Almighty God.
Victories raise the spirits of current fighters and make it easier to recruit new ones. When the Americans left Afghanistan in disorderly haste, when fanatical Hamas paragliders raped their way through a music festival in Israel and uploaded their exploits to the internet, and when ISIS-K murdered more than 130 people in the heart of Mr. Putin’s Russia, morale in both terrorspheres soared.
Beyond fear and hope, our enemies also seek to use compassion as a weapon to divide us and ultimately paralyze our response. Even in hawkish Israel, the resolve to fight Hamas is pitted against the desire to free the hostages. Distraught friends, relatives and sympathetic members of the public agitate for something, anything, to free the hostages in Gaza at almost any cost. This is understandable and even commendable. But public safety requires that leaders measure the demands of compassion against the requirements of strategy. Hard, bitter choices are part of the job.
Their intent to kill us has been obvious. Killers gotta kill. Sure, it's been quiet here. Too quiet.
But the resolve to destroy murdering, terrorist rapists is hard to generate in the West. Indeed, sympathy for the jihadis is revoltingly on the rise.
I ask again, why do we hate us?
Make more good jihadis. Don't be skittish about the rightness of that course of action when fighting brutal killers with no body count of infidels--including other Moslems unwilling to celebrate the jihad--capable of slaking their thirst for blood.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
