That does nothing to downplay what ISIS are trying to do. ISIS are carrying out genocide, and don’t think that the amount of Christians they have killed so far is the total of how many they will eventually kill. They have made it clear that they want to kill off Christianity across the entire world. Unless they are stopped, they are coming to kill us and sell wives and children into sexual slavery.
You really need to pay more attention to the news. ISIS has shown more talent than Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the majority of Al Qaeda (with the exception of the attack on 9/11, and there have been no more coordinated attacks with this level of destruction). In large part that is due to their attraction to talent, starting with the core makeup consisting of prior Iraq senior military, and their exceptional use of electronic media; and the recent revelation that they are moving into sophistication in finding ways to replace batteries in heat seeking rockets. However, they also have been losing ground militarily in the last several months, and are having a harder time recruiting form other nations. They are not whipped, but they are also not growing enough to even hold the ground they are taking, let alone taking more ground. You are way over rating them.
ISIS have only just got started and we are most definitely in their sights. We should be under no illusions there, they represent a real danger to the entire world, and Christians in particular are in there sights for extermination.
They have managed to obtain copycat groups in some African countries, none of which has the leadership skill set brought by the ex Iraq senior military. That they can create chaos is obviously true. But their size is far less than you seem to be proposing.
They have already almost wiped out Christianity in the territories they already occupy and they are bent on expanding. They have specifically stated that Europe is next on their plan (including flying their flag over St Peter’s).
they say a lot of things, most of which amounts to nothing more than instilling fear - which you are exhibiting - and trying to destabilize communities and countries. Their physical ability to take Europe is going to amount to not much more than the attack, for example, in France. Last I checked, France is still France; it has not been converted to Islam, nor destroyed.
If ISIS are such a “junior varsity” team then how come the West (with all its powerful military) has not been able to stop them in their tracks? When ISIS were first starting to have some military successes in Iraq, Western politicians poo-pooed them as just a rag-bag of militants that would soon fizzle out. At the time I remember there was only one lone voice warning of the danger and capability of ISIS (I think he was a retire British army general, but I can’t remember his name). Everyone else was downplaying them as irrelevant.It was our President who poo pooed them; and he took over after we had had a two front war in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was he who chose to remove troops faster than the military was advising, which allowed ISIS to form. And it is he who has decided no “boots on the ground”, instead trying to support opposition groups (and the facts indicate some of those groups have been less than worthless in fighting). The military long before this started up had said, and continues to say, that you cannot win without boots on the ground.
We downplay this evil at our peril. Fr Gabrielle Amorth is correct, ISIS is indeed satan. And satan may be many things, but “junior varsity player” is not a term I would use to describe him.
I am not going to get into a discussion as to where and with or through whom Satan may be working. 54 million dead in the US alone due to abortion pretty much speaks for itself.
What most people don’t seem to get is that ISIS is a subset of one branch of Islam, and the two major branches have about a 1200 year history of going at each other, often in a very bloody fashion. And neither branch has made any effort to hide what they feel about the Western World in the last, oh, say 50 years. They call us the Great Satan, and base a large part of that on the secular societies which make up that Western World. And in that, they are not far off the mark as to morality, or the lack thereof.
The problem is far more intractable than many are willing to admit; whether it is ISIS or some other offset arising from the fundamentalist, radicalized part of Islam. Intelligence estimates have been that somewhere between15% and 25% of Muslims are radicalized, with a far smaller subset willing to take up arms/IEDs/suicide vests and attack in isolated incidents. And that is out of about 1 billion Muslims. And if you are not good at math, that is 150 to 250 million radicalized people.
