Understanding your enemy is the first step in doing battle and defeating him.

In World War II, our enemies were clearly identified, with Japanese expanding in the Pacific and Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini attempting to dominate Europe through fascism. The Allies had to confront and defeat these evil threats to maintain our freedoms.Last Friday's murderous rampage in Paris by radical Islamist terrorists proved that this enemy is not the "JV team" that President Barack Obama had earlier labeled them. The attacks by ISIS or ISIL were well-armed and coordinated.ISIS fighters are willing to die for their ideology, whether it be recruiting the young, targeting military installations or going after soft targets like a crowded soccer stadium, a restaurant or a concert hall.In less than two years, FBI Director James Comey said ISIS progressed from a terror start-up overseas to a "chaotic spider web" in this country, with young Muslim men being radicalized in Illinois and the 49 other states. He said ISIS uses social media like a job fair to recruit the young.British Prime Minister David Cameron has a handle on the ISIS ideology, calling them a threat to our way of life and the "challenge of a generation."Last July, just weeks after a gunman went on a murderous rampage on a beach in Tunisia, Cameron addressed the young British Muslims being recruited to join ISIS through social media.He said they seek to rally young people to their poisonous cause by offering them a sense of belonging that they lack at home. Cameron exposed the barbarians' recruitment agenda."If you are a boy, they will brainwash you, strap bombs to your body and blow you up," he said. "If you are a girl, they will enslave and abuse you. That is the sick and brutal reality of ISIL."The ISIS or ISIL philosophy is represented in their black battle flag, which shows the Seal of Muhammad within a white circle, with the phrase above it, "There is no God but Allah."This symbolism points to ISIL's belief that it represents the restoration of the caliphate, a form of Islamic government led by a caliph or person considered a political and religious successor to the Islamic prophet, Muhammad.The different names taken on by radical Islamists - including ISIS, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, Ansar al-Islam - may be confusing but they all have a common goal.They want to kill as many Americans, Christians and Jews as they can.Former Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who served as President George W. Bush's ambassador to Iraq and Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan, once referred to ISIS as "evil incarnate."With ISIS now aiming at targets outside the Middle East, Crocker feels the world is on "a perilous course" and that our present administration doesn't understand the evil threat very well.Videos of atrocities, such as prisoners and even children being beheaded, coupled with last week's barbaric attacks on civilian targets in Paris support the fact that ISIS is "evil incarnate."Western leaders and freedom backers must form a united front to rid this deadly plague from our planet.By JIM ZBICK |

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