The Evil that is ISIS.

The so-called Islamic State, also known as ISIL and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), has created havoc in Syria and Iraq in the last few years.  In 2012, they kidnapped 33 journalists in Syria.  This week they released a gruesome video of an ISIS fighter beheading freelance journalist James Wright Foley.  A few weeks ago, Al Jazeera released photos of Christian men beheaded by ISIS.  News outlets around the world almost obsessively reported on the plight of a large number of Yadzis, a small Muslim sect, as they faced potential extinction by ISIS forces.  Over six million Syrians and Iraqis have been displaced.  Many of these refugees fled for their lives, for fear of being persecuted or killed by vicious ISIS fanatics.  Whole communities of Christians in Iraq and Syria, some of which have lived continuously in the region since the beginnings of Christianity in the first century, have been persecuted, killed and/or displaced.  Christian children have been sawed in half. Other Christians have been crucified and their corpses used to line the streets to intimidate others.  It is time for the world to confront this evil.  This is not merely a political movement.  It is an outright evil that must be stopped.  These are not merely Sunni militants, as described by the New York Times and other news outlets.  This is an evil not seen in our world since the Nazis of the 20th century.  The war crimes of Bosnia-Herzegovina/Serbia, the genocidal horrors of Rawanda, the Killing fields of Cambodia... None of these, as terrible as they were, rise to the level of evil that ISIS has become.  No person or group who advocates, sympathizes or perpetrates this kind of religiously motivated evil should be tolerated.  I believe in freedom, but that freedom ends when such freedom is used to deprive others of their freedom, liberties and rights.  This is evil, pure and simple. It is time America act, not to contain these monsters, but to destroy them.  This is not a petty civil war; this is not a conflict like the historically difficult Israeli-Palestinian struggle.  This is an evil that the world must face now.  ISIS must be confronted now.