Terry Glavin: Whose side are we on?

...Allegiances are shifting. The bloodthirsty, creepy Vladimir Putin is ever more strenuously insinuating himself into NATO’s military and diplomatic circles. U.S. President Barack Obama is appearing increasingly feckless even to his senior advisers, so many of whom have jumped ship or resigned in exasperation. The French and the British have pretty well had it with Obama, and appear to be hedging their NATO bets on what is suddenly seeming to be the more reliable mutual-defence guarantee available in the European Union Treaty.

ISIL’s Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, meanwhile, is giving every indication of having shifted gears from ISIL’s founding, schismatic monomania, which insists on the allegiance of the world’s Muslims to a crackpot territorial caliphate within Dar al-Islam – the land of Islam. Al-Baghdadi is now increasingly dispatching his lunatics in a full-metal hyperdrive of the Al Qaida doctrine from which he emerged, which stipulates a religious obligation binding all Muslims to wage a global jihad against “Crusaders and Jews” by way of bloody terror in the land of war – Dar-al-Harab.

ISIL has been dropping what you might call rather broad hints about its insistence on the duty of slaying kuffars in Dar-al-Harab for quite a while. More than a year ago, ISIL blowhard Sheikh Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani singled out the French, Canadians, Australians and Americans as ripe and proper targets for mayhem. Lone-wolf jihadists should turn on any available infidel, “smash his head with a rock,” run over him with a car, “destroy his crops,” or poison him.

Within weeks, Martin Couture-Rouleau murdered Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent in Quebec and Rouleau’s fellow Muslim convert Michael Zehaf-Bibeau went on a shooting spree in Ottawa, murdering Corporal Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and barging into the Parliament Buildings where he was finally cut down in a barrage of bullets. At the time, it was fashionably comforting to the NDP and some Liberals to insist that the pair were merely listening to voices in their heads, and not the voice of Sheikh Al-Adnani...