Your views

Dear Sir,
I argued in these pages back in October that the beheading, first of Western Newspaper Reporters, then Aid Workers was because the Extremists of ISIS were setting out to offend and insult the West to the maximum.
The kinder the person, the more good they were doing the better to mock the Infidels with their escalating brutality. The last people they wish in their Caliphate are Western do-gooders.
Their logic is beyond our understanding. They want to goad the unbelievers (us) into using NATO forces to attack them on the ground and bomb from the air killing innocent women and children bystanders in large numbers which will aid their recruitment and confirm waverers doubting the evil intentions of these new Crusaders. Contrary to many they are not cowards but (again beyond our logic) will lay down their lives for their cause.
ISIS does not want Arab forces attacking them, not from fear, but for propaganda gains they prefer if the visible enemy is not Islamic but Heathen. They are succeeding in their intrigue.
We are unable to ignore them and unable to count on the Arab forces that militarily already overwhelmingly outnumber them and so should be able to neutralise ISIS without our help if they really wished.
Perhaps we can understand better if we remember that in the Moslem calendar we are in the year 1436 AH.
There are similarities with us back in 1436 AD. Henry VI (aged 15) was on the English throne. Then we also beheaded people in public.
Teenage girls were not exempt - we had recently burned Joan of Arc (aged 19) at the state and were handing out similar retribution to our own heretics the Lollards forerunners of Protestantism. Now ISIS has followed our gruesome history by burning alive a Jordanian Pilot.
Their policy has succeeded with the Jordanian Government arbitrarily executing two long term terrorist prisoners in retribution.
This success in goading their enemy may lead to even more gruesome deaths. Let’s hope they are unaware of the death sentence handed out by England to the Scot William Wallace.  
 
Mike Lillico
Playa de Palma