-By Frank Salvato
A friend of mine said recently, “We shouldn’t even be there. Let them kill each other. I mean, that would solve the problem. Right?” I thought about that statement as I read the news coming out of the Gaza Strip. As Hamas and al-Fatah literally battle to the death for supremacy in their region, it is crucial that we take the time – right now – to understand what it is they’re fighting about. The truth is our lives depend on it.
To look at the situations in Iraq and Gaza as separate conflicts is to view them in a naïve and overly simplistic way. True, the battles taking place in Gaza are more akin to a civil war, if in fact a civil war can take place without a recognized country to govern. And the battles taking place in Iraq are almost completely instigated at the hands of al Qaeda terrorists hell-bent on creating chaos with violence while destroying any chance of democracy in that nation. But what the less visionary among us are deficient in understanding and neglectful or deceitful in not addressing is the reason they are fighting, their goal, their end-game.
Many anti-war activists and members of the American Fifth Column insist that the reason radical Islamist terrorists – insurgents or militants as they like to call them – have taken to jihad against the United States and the West is because of the encroachment of our culture into the 7th Century Middle Eastern culture in which they exist. They point to Osama bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa against the US and the West citing the presence of Western military personnel and installations as the catalyst for al Qaeda’s Islamofascist aggression.
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