Photo: Militant Islamist fighters wave flags in a military parade in Syria’s northern Raqqa REUTERS/Stringer
Francois Hollande, the Socialist president of France, has said that the slaughter in Paris… was “an act of war.” Pope Francis, at a commemoration service for the 100,000 Italian soldiers killed in the World War One (his grandfather was one of the soldiers who survived) said that “one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.” General David Richards said… in June this year that the threat is existential and “that we need to approach this issue of Muslim extremism as we might approach World War Two back in the 1930s.”
…the nightmare of politicians and secret services has been that rogue states, and/or terrorist groups, would acquire weapons of mass destruction. Islamic State might be the organization to put flesh on that nightmare, because it has the money and can buy the expertise to make WMD. Put together money, expertise and an Islamist-nihilist philosophy, and you have a weapon of huge destructive power, pointing at both the West and the East. This,… adds up… to an existential threat. A threat to our existence, our way of life.