Israel Stands with Paris

11-15-2015

Darkness visited the "City of Light" on Friday, Nov. 13, 2015. Sadly, Israelis have lived with this darkness for many years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a message to French President Hollande and said Israel "stands shoulder to shoulder" with the people of France.

Tragically, Israel knows too well the horrors of Islamic terror. They also know the goals motivating these jihadists. One of those goals is to intimidate France from participating in the battle against ISIS. Another is to expand their more than 1-year-old caliphate far beyond the former nations of Syria and Iraq. In the summer of 2014, my cameraman Jonathan Goff, our translator/guide Pastor Majeed, and I heard firsthand that chilling goal.

From the Kurdish capital, Erbil, we drove to a hastily set up refugee camp after ISIS captured Iraq's second largest city, Mosul. We met a former Iraqi soldier named Sha'alan who worked in intelligence. In that capacity, he interrogated ISIS fighters.

Below is the account of that meeting with Sha'alan in the book CBN News' Chris Mitchell wrote called Destination Jerusalem:

"We meet Sha'alan, an Iraqi soldier. He's one of the Iraqi soldiers almost universally vilified for abandoning their positions, dropping their weapons and fleeing the battle. Most melted away in the face of ISIS. However, he insists he fought bravely until his commanding officers fled. 'Then, what else could I do?' he asks us. After the fall of Nineveh, he's a man without a country. He can't go back to Nineveh; ISIS would kill him. But he can't fly to Baghdad, and he doesn't have any documentation to go into the Kurdish city of Erbil. You can read the dread in his eyes. Even though he's outside of the city, he says he's still 'inside the fire.'

He tells us many ISIS fighters are from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar and other Muslim nations. Experts warn that these hardened fighters might be the next wave of jihadists heading to Europe and the United States.

Serving in Iraqi intelligence, Sha'alan interviewed captured ISIS soldiers and learned that their agenda is much bigger than just Iraq. He warned us they don't have merely a countrywide or even regional agenda.

His sobering words issue a warning: 'We know that ISIS is not dreaming to rule over Iraq only, but they're dreaming to go to Europe and rule over the entire European continent and, if I'm allowed to say, ISIS is dreaming to rule over the whole world.'

It wouldn't be the last time we heard ISIS had an agenda far beyond the borders of Iraq or the boundaries of the Middle East. Their twenty-first century dream echoed the dreams of other would-be global conquerors who left millions of desperate people like Sha'alan in their wake."

In his statement, Netanyahu put this in the context of Western civilization:

"I call on the entire civilized world to unite to defeat the plague of worldwide terrorism," the Israeli leader said. "An attack on any one of us should be seen as an attack on all of us. All terrorism must be condemned and fought equally with unwavering determination. It's only with this moral clarity that the forces of civilization will defeat the savagery of terrorism."

Netanyahu is right, this is a civilizational jihad. It's not about the "occupation." It's not about having "two states living side by side in peace and security." It's about one civilization against another. It's about freedom vs. tyranny and in Islamic terms the "House of Peace" waging war against the "House of War."

We need to be educated regarding what this war is about. We need to understand our enemy. And we need to win. Years ago, we interviewed Bernard Lewis, a man many considered the world's leading expert on Islam. He said the stakes in this war are "the survival of our civilization."

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