They aren't dogs

I'll be very frank, my view of the War with the Islamic State varies considerably from most of the fairly muddled thinking that I hear out there regarding this. Indeed, I think the commentary that ponders in angst why this is happening, and what the Islamic State wants, is dense.

 

Or perhaps a blistering combination of extremely naive combined with historically inept.

Simply put, the Islamic State seeks to establish a global Whabbi Sunni Caliphate that will truck no compromise with any force counter to it.  No other religion is to be allowed to stand and Muslims who are not strictly and purely observant are to be regarded as apostates.  It's willing to use violence to achieve this goal, it has no shorter goal, and its backed up in goals and thinking by its organic document, the Koran.  We might like to pretend that in the 21st Century we don't fight religious wars, but we're in one.  And frankly, we're not doing very darned well in it.  Our enemy is winning on the battlefield and its winning the propaganda war amongst its demographic.  Its even winning non Islamic Europeans as converts to its cause, in an era when Christian churches have tended to reduce their message to something like "it's nice to be nice to the nice".

So, that being my view, it may come as a surprise that I'm fairly disturbed by the recent political efforts to restrict the very small number of Syrian refugees we were going to take in to probably nothing.

My view probably varies as well from the liberal commentators on this, who seem to put their comments in the context of not letting in the refugees is a victory for the Islamic State.  I doubt that's their view at all.  Being devout hardcore Wahhabi Sunnis, they're no doubt fully convinced that they will win, and would prefer to have large bodies of Muslims in Western nations, from whom they no doubt believe they can recruit when the call comes. And they are being successful in recruiting a few.

But that's not what matters here. What matters is that Western values, which no matter what secular humanists may think of them, are based on the Christian concepts of humanity and charity, and that requires us to relieve suffering where we can, and here we can help.  It's the classic Christian situation.  Yes, a few of these people, albeit a very few, may be dangerous.  Nonetheless, they are all suffering in one way or another, so we should help.  That stands to defeat the barbarous nature of the Islamic State more than anything else does.

Now, I'm not advocating pacifism here either, and I'm certainly not a pacifist.  While I was very much opposed to trying to support any faction in the Syrian civil war early on, now the situation is too far gone and we have no choice but to fight the Islamic State.  And, in my view, not in the slow motion air campaign we're doing now.  

But at the same time, and until we can solve this matter, we have to recognize that a lot of desperate innocent people, and a few desperate guilty people, are on the move, and we need to do what we can. That humanity shows the difference between them and us, and between inherent and inherited Christian values and Islamic extremism.