Without America, the Gates of Hell Would Open

Again and again, the United States is attacked for its policies regarding the Middle East. But without it, the genocide in Iraq would be unstoppable. Now, the entire West has to help support the Kurds.

The murders, massacres, death and terror in Iraq reveal a lot. First and foremost they show what happens when Islamic fanatics are given modern weapons. They quickly forget the suras in the Quran and open the gates of hell. They execute and use firing squads, plunder and rape, stab and strangle, massacre and slaughter.

Rarely is one witness to atrocities on such a scale. Genocide is happening against Yazidis and Christians, and the world community watches. This leads to the next step, the present Armageddon in Iraq.

There is only one power capable of stopping the terrorist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant: the United States. Its president, indeed no friend of hasty interventions, is preparing to protect the Christians, Yazidis and Kurds.

As commander-in-chief, he is instructing his armed forces to protect the people who have fled to the mountains by using fighter drones and air strikes against the ISIL cutthroats, and then to drop food and water supplies.

The Outrage of Moral Catechists

If it weren’t for the American superpower, how much higher the mountains of corpses in the world would be! It must be said clearly at last: Without the U.S. in the Middle East, there wouldn’t only be chaos, but an eruption of unparalleled murderous frenzy.

What hasn’t been written in Europe and the Arabic world against America’s presence in Iraq? How outraged are our moral catechists whenever Washington makes a mistake somewhere? How gleeful and zealous were they when the White House withdrew its troops from Iraq, because the supposed imperialists, who were only concerned with oil, would finally disappear?

If these critics weren’t so ideologically narrow-minded, they would have to realize that the American president is setting his military forces in motion even though his people, on the whole, have no appetite to send their soldiers to the remotest corners of the globe.

President Obama is risking the lives of his soldiers, despite the fact that his country is hardly dependent on the region’s oil. Shouldn’t it have dawned on a lot of America’s critics that it is a prisoner of its responsibilities?

The Silence of the Muslims

But it remains quiet on all sides. Hardly anyone in Europe is fretting. And that, as well, brutally shows the tragedy in Iraq. For Germany and its neighbors, the outcry doesn’t depend on the number of the victims. It depends on who the victims are.

If a few thousand Palestinians die in a war that their leaders started, it drives the people out on to the streets, because they can finally fulminate against Israel again. If Arabs slaughter other Arabs and Kurds by the tens of thousands, if they are in the process of committing genocide, for many contemporaries here at home, it is sad, but far away.

Which Muslim associations in Germany have condemned the genocide in Iraq? Which imam in Cologne or Copenhagen, Milan or Munich, has already launched a thunderous sermon from his pulpit against the murderers and black sheep of his own religion?

The killing in Iraq also shows that it doesn’t go on like this in Europe anymore. Multiculturalism has to end when it means the forfeiture of European civilization, when it means we have to accept murder and manslaughter with a shrug of the shoulders. It was Dolf Sternberger, writing about right-wing extremism, who said, “No freedom for enemies of freedom.” This sentence must also apply today to Islamists in Germany.

One Must Be Safe in Germany

It cannot be allowed that Yazidis here at home are scared of Muslims and no longer dare to step foot in the streets. It cannot be that Jews are insulted and offended by German Muslims, because the latter do not understand that the Middle East conflict has much to do with Israel (and the Palestinians), but nothing to do with German Jews.

But first and foremost, the mass murder in Iraq has to be prevented. Unfortunately it cannot be stopped by air strikes alone. The West must equip the Kurds with modern weapons. Currently, they are the only guarantee that the region between Syria and Iraq won’t entirely become a plundering caliphate.

Beyond that, it may be expedient for the West to consider briefly stationing troops in northern Iraq to support the Kurdish peshmerga fighters. And Germany?

German should, at least, do one thing: take in Christian and Yazidi refugees, quickly and without bureaucratic hurdles. Once here, they must be protected against Salafists and other extremists. Whoever attacks them attacks the German state and its society. The time for waffling around is over.