Battle for soul of Muslim, Arab worlds

As an American Muslim and as a journalist, I am more than appalled by the murder of James Foley and the murder video. If I were king of whatever/wherever, I would go to war to wipe out these Islamic State perverts - perverters not just of Islam, but of all the decencies known to all men and women of all the traditional faiths and to all men and women of just simple decent feelings.

And not just for James Foley, brave soul that he was. But for all the victims of this atrocity that is called the "Islamic State" - and known to us as ISIL or ISIS - the Christians, the Yazidis, the Shia soldiers of the Iraqi army who surrendered and were then executed gangland style; the Sufis and any Iraqi Sunni who does not submit in public to the barbaric Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the false khalifa of Islam.

Because of these criminals, who but traditional Muslims and decent Western scholars of Islam know that, for Muslims, the greatest litany of all, invoked at all times, in all places, is Bism'Allah ar-Rahman, ar-Raheem - in the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.

The grand muftis of Saudi Arabia and Egypt know these killers by their proper name - heretics, defilers of Islam. In the words of Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh of Saudi Arabia, both IS and al-Qaeda are "enemy number one of Islam."

Yet the leading association of British Muslims, while condemning Foley's murder, nevertheless accuses the British, and presumably American and Arab, media of "glamorizing" these perverts, presumably by screening the video of this and the earlier mass executions. What could that comment mean?

Perhaps the British Muslims' association is so reticent about showing the murder video of the execution because the executioner has a British accent and is believed to be a British Muslim. Such defensiveness is counterproductive and borders on letting the IS murderers partially off the hook.

It is true that IS makes videos of its atrocities in order to put fear into the hearts of the Iraqi Sunnis they now rule over, as well as the Iraqi army, which fell apart in northern Iraq when the IS offensive began.

But it is not fear that forced the Kurdish Peshmerga forces to fall back in the first weeks of combat with IS - it was the superior firepower inadvertently provided IS by America, courtesy of the disintegrating Iraqi army. Let the Muslim world see the crimes that these men commit, and then decide which side it is on.

The Foley story is obviously of continuing interest in the American media, even though the grisly video of his execution no longer dominates traditional and social media. The front-page story in America moved on to the reaction of Foley's friends, family, and colleagues, and then beyond that to debates over further American involvement in striking at IS in Syria, as well as intensifying the air campaign in Iraq.

Of course, part of the story has been the curiously cool response President Obama had taken to the obvious swelling threat of IS, not just this past July and the first days of August, but in the many months before that, when the United States was funneling military equipment to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's hopeless Iraqi army while ignoring the Peshmerga, the armed forces of Iraqi Kurdistan, which is the only successfully governed and religiously tolerant portion of Iraq. And, with rare exceptions, the U.S. mainstream media went along, ignoring the threat as it developed first in war-torn Syria and then across the border into Iraq.

I cannot forget how Obama said -in a most condescending tone - in the earliest days of U.S. Air Force strikes against IS fighters, who were advancing on Erbil and terrorizing the Christians of Mosul, that the American jet fighters "are not the Iraqi air force." Why not? But I also wonder: Why just the U.S. Air Force? Where are the Arab and Turkish air forces? For the fight in Iraq is a battle for the soul of the Arab and Muslim worlds.