MOSCOW, August 22. /ITAR-TASS/. The apparent execution of American journalist James Foley recorded on camera and later posted on the web by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an extremist group, has shocked the international community.
The world has not seen such barbarically intimidating and demonstratively defiant actions for a long time. All the more so as near Foley was another hostage of terrorists, Times reporter Steven Sotloff, who had an executioner’s knife above his head.
“The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision,” the masked black-robed militant in the video said addressing the US president.
Obama made a special statement on the murder of Foley. British Prime Minister David Cameron stopped his summer vacation and urgently returned from western England to London to hold a meeting with a number of ministers concerning the situation in Iraq.
According to British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Philip Hammond, the execution could have been carried out by a native of Britain who is a member of the Islamic State group.
Hammond said should Islamic radicals establish a caliphate on Iraqi and Syrian territories seized by them, it will pose danger to entire Europe and the rest of the world.
There is no doubt that such a state will become a base for attacks on Western countries, he said, adding that the ISIL movement is waging a war against Arab countries, the traditional Muslim society and the West, and the West should be guided by that in its actions.
French President Francois Hollande also reacted to the execution of the American journalist. In an interview with Le Monde newspaper, he proposed convening an international conference on the situation in Iraq.
The reaction of other Western leaders to the regular monstrous crime of ISIL terrorists is predictable and understandable. The only surprising thing is why the insight of politicians from Washington, London, Paris and other Western capitals comes so late, when the death of American, British, French and other nationals of the so-called civilized countries can’t be reversed?
Why did they not react to reasonable voices earlier, in 2001, or in the 1970s, when mujahidins who later became the military wing of Al-Qaeda and other radical extremist movements had been armed and trained to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan? Or when the United States, NATO and their partners were preparing to attack Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria?
When they organized color revolutions, deposed regimes in Baghdad and Tripoli, or tried to punish Syria’s “uncompromising” President Bashar Assad with the hands of the same terrorists that they are bombing in northern Iraq? The questions are rhetorical, but everyone knows the results.
Now they can make threatening statements, convene international conferences and bomb again without admitting to themselves that violence only causes violence. It is impossible to impose on another nation their own understanding of democracy, human rights and a way of living alien to its ages-old traditions.
Can it be that all this chaos with terrorists, murders and abuse of civilians, which started in many countries that became objects of Western geopolitical experiments, including Ukraine, is the ultimate goal of Washington, London, Paris and other NATO capitals? Maybe the ancient maxim “divide and rule” is the unshakable ideology and basis for international practice exercised by the North Atlantic leaders?
None of them has said a single word about the murder of Russian journalists in Ukraine. They kept silent for a long time also when Ukraine’s security service captured our colleagues under far-fetched pretexts, or when Rossiya Segodnya agency photojournalist Andrey Stenin went missing… Maybe because Russian reporters and Russian nationals will not vote for them and their parties in the upcoming elections.
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