One of the leading experts on the global jihad movement believes Western leaders must wake up to the “existential threat” of radical Islam and devise strategies to combat it before more Christians and Jews are slaughtered.
On Breitbart News Sunday, Erick Stackelbeck, a Christian Broadcasting Network reporter and the author of ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam, told Breitbart News Executive Chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon that churches in the West must also display a “collective boldness” against radical Islam that has been lacking to date.
Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday hours after ISIS released another video of mass beheadings, this time of Ethiopian Christians in Libya, Stackelbeck said when he first started to extensively focus on the global jihad movement last decade, he “thought the West is going to wake up,” especially after the 9/11 attacks in America, the London and Madrid attacks abroad, and Iran’s quest to acquire nuclear weapons. Stackelbeck said he thought the “United States in particular will wake up and see that we are facing an existential threat” from radical Islam.
“I guess I had too much faith in the West,” he said. “And I hate to say that as a proud Westerner.”
Stackelbeck said the governments in the United States and Europe, in addition to the elites and the media, still have not caught up to the radical Islam threat. And to complicate matters even more, the Obama administration, he said, has often made things worse by “actually aiding and empowering our enemies and staying silent in the face of genocide of Christians in North Africa and the Middle East.”
“I thought the West would wake up. It hasn’t happened,” he added. “It’s gone in the opposite direction in a very, very dangerous way.”
Stackelbeck said ISIS’s declarations against Christians and Jews are reminiscent of Hitler’s during World War II when Hitler was “very upfront about what he wanted to do to the Jews.” He mentioned that a lot of people then did not believe Hitler like many today are in denial about ISIS’s threats.
“They are actually openly saying, ‘yes, we want to carry out genocide–we want to wipe every last follower of Jesus off the map in the cradle of Christianity,'” Stackelbeck said of ISIS.
Noting that ISIS has 25,000 foreign fighters from at least 90 countries–including 180 U.S. citizens and at least 5,000 Europeans–Stackelbeck said that ISIS has put its “tentacles deeply into the West” largely through glorifying their atrocities on social media.
He mentioned that “there is a segment of people here in the West that are drawn to all of the carnage and the bloodshed” and to the “beheadings, burnings, and enslavement” perhaps because “maybe some are desensitized from years of playing video games chopping people’s heads off” and watching horror movies with realistic torture scenes. ISIS, according to Stackelbeck, also spends hundreds of thousands of dollars producing movies and using hip hop and rap music to recruit westerners.
He said ISIS is a “different beast” and “long gone are the days of Osama bin Laden standing in front of a green screen and droning on and on in Arabic.” But the West is still steps behind and the “United States is virtually MIA” as ISIS is metastasizing in every direction, according to Stackelbeck.
He argued that because “we are in a crisis point in the Christian world and in the west” where “Judeo-Christian values are under assault,” it is imperative that “we need to devise a strategy to really combat this in a really forceful way to defeat it.”
Stackelbeck, though, could not pinpoint why there has not been a “collective boldness” in the churches around the country and throughout the western world regarding the threat of radical Islam.
“ISIS and other jihadist groups are very open and very clear about what they want to do to the followers of the cross,” he said. “They want to liquidate them.”
Stackelbeck warned that radical Islamic groups are “putting the plan in motion” and he mentioned that “there’s an old saying in radical Islam: First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”
“And the Sunday people have a bullseye on their backs right now,” he said, mentioning the horror stories from Christians in Syria about Christian children being beheaded, enslaved, and butchered. “If the West doesn’t step up, it’s going to continue.”
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