Why Muslim Terrorists Don’t Kidnap Russians

Terrorists use terrorism because it works, although not against everybody. The Soviet Union’s flaws were without number, but the effete, obsequious squeamishness that characterizes the current American approach to Islam was not among them. From 1986:

The Jerusalem Post said the Soviet secret police last year secured the release of three kidnaped Soviet diplomats in Beirut by castrating a relative of a radical Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head.

The incident began when four Soviet diplomats were kidnaped last September by Muslim extremists who demanded that Moscow pressure the Syrian government to stop pro-Syrian militiamen from shelling rival Muslim positions in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

The militiamen, the Jerusalem paper said, did not cease their attacks, and the body of one of the Soviet diplomats, Arkady Katkov, was found a few days later in a field in Beirut.

The KGB then apparently kidnaped and killed a relative of an unnamed leader of the Shias’ Hezbollah (Party of God) group, a radical, pro-Iranian group that has been suspected of various terrorist activities against Western targets in Lebanon.

Parts of the man’s body, the paper said, were then sent to the Hezbollah leader with a warning that he would lose other relatives in a similar fashion if the three remaining Soviet diplomats were not immediately released. They were quickly freed.

The newspaper quoted “observers in Jerusalem” as saying: “This is the way the Soviets operate. They do things–they don’t talk. And this is the language Hezbollah understands.”

In contrast, Obama doesn’t do things—he issues perfunctory condemnations and then goes back to playing golf.

Islamists understand that too. That’s why we should brace ourselves for a deluge of terror once ISIS has subdued local resistance and can turn its full attention to us…

America doesn’t do business like the KGB. But the policy of appeasing when not ignoring Islam will have to be revised, or there will be many more incidents like the execution of James Foley.