Free Republic

The beheading of yet another Western journalist, Steven Sotloff, has ignited another round of commentary suggesting that the Islamic State is the worst terrorist network ever. There is value in this: The current jihadist threat to the United States and the West is more dire than the threat that existed just prior to the 9/11 attacks, so anything that increases pressure for a sea change in our Islamic-supremacist-enabling government’s policies helps. Nevertheless, the perception that the Islamic State is something new and different and aberrational compared with the Islamic-supremacist threat we’ve been living with for three decades is wrong, perhaps...

War On Terror: Still suspending disbelief that al-Qaida is as dead as Osama bin Laden, President Obama insists that the Islamic State, aka ISIS, is not al-Qaida. In fact, they're the same terrorist group. The president would have us believe the "barbaric" terror group controlling large swaths of Iraq and Syria just popped up out of nowhere to decapitate Americans and threaten the world. But U.S. intelligence agents know better, and so does the man they brief. "The Islamic State is al-Qaida," asserted famed former federal terrorist prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy. "It is the evolution of the ruthless al-Qaida division...