So why not give them one?

Need I explain further? Send enough US led troops to liberate Dabiq, then hold it against what should be the inevitable ISIS counterattacks. Hey, they want to die there and we want to kill them, so this is what we call a win-win. A battle over limited real estate will surely be easier to manage than Obama’s hypothetical liberation of all of ISIS-occupied Syria and Iraq.

And if this does not draw them into the long-awaited apocalypse, well, we were planning (last summer, at least) to sweep that zone and make it a haven anyway. Where is the downside? Rhetorical question, I know Obama will find one.

In light of all the discussion on Twitter about “what ISIS wants” and that we’re giving it to them by attacking them, this is quite amusing:

It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch:

“We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Wait, what? Yes we did…”

“No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”

“WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.”

“No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”

“Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.”

“Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”

“What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement doesn’t even enter into it!”

“Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”

“Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”

“No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”

“OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?”

I think you have to start by killing the idiots.

[Update a few minutes later]

If you like your Islam, you can keep your Islam:

[Obama’s] not a Muslim himself. He claims to be a Christian (in the Reverend Wright tradition) and is actually a post-modern agnostic who almost never goes to church, except for political purposes. But he is a Muslim by emotion, by childhood attachment to his days in an Indonesian madrassa when his father, and later his mother, abandoned him. The morning cry of the muezzin, he has told us, is the most moving sound on Earth to him. It undoubtedly reassured him.

Unfortunately, what soothed Barack as a youth turns out to be a death scream of Seventh Century tribalism for the rest of us. He can’t countenance that, so he has to disconnect the carnage of ISIS, etc. from the ideology that drives it. It can’t be that the Islamic State is Islamic. That would mean there is something wrong with him. But it is. Indeed it is an orthodox form of Islam with roots going back to the Medina Koran.

Most Muslims know this (and Obama undoubtedly knows it too on some level); so when these Muslims hear the president deny that ISIS is Islamic, they know he is lying and dismiss what he is saying. He isn’t fooling anybody except his liberal/progressive clientele at home. It’s a form of taqiyya for local consumption — permissible lying in defense of the faith — one he doesn’t actually believe, but identifies with.

As I’ve often said, Obama can’t be a Muslim (or a Christian) because that requires believing in something higher than yourself.