Jon Schwarz,

You are entirely mistaken. The extract below, taken from your post, explains in IS’s own words why they hate us.

The ISIS magazine Dabiq cheerfully tells us that “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah … even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”

The narrative that the free world is bombing Muslims comes from posts such as yours and the anti-war movement in the free world. The truth is that never before have freemen given so much blood and treasure freeing Muslims from their oppressors.

When has the free world ever bombed Muslims? The free world made up of many parliamentary democracies is ruled by the best argument and as such can do no wrong. There cannot ever be a better ruler than the best argument. I use the term FREE WORLD because its not the west but includes every parliamentary democracy including Japan and S Korea.

The free world with its anti-war and humanitarian institutions such as the UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, MSF, Amnesty International and Red Cross to name but a few hesitated for a decade before intervening in Iraq in the Iraq War (second Gulf War). Should we have continued to do nothing when Saddam killed 700,000 Kurds and gassed 5,000 in Halabja? Should we have done nothing when Gaddafi was about to “kill all the rats in Benghazi”? Should we have done nothing when IS was about to kill all the Yazidi?

The Royal Air Force has made over 1,000 sorties against IS targets in Iraq and Syria without a single civilian casualty. The 66 nation coalition fighting IS has made 15,000 sorties with only 55 civilian casualties. Russia would kill more than that in one sortie and even use bunker bombs when they realised that hospitals were surviving deep underground.

The second Iraq War killed 30,000 and was over in days. Civilian casualties were flown to Kuwait and London for treatment. Who would have believed that Sunni and Shia Muslims could behave as badly as their hero Muhammad in the twenty-first century? The detail is too disturbing to mention. But how did the US respond to this sectarian bloodshed? They introduced the SURGE and build walls between Sunni and Shia despite the additional cost in blood and treasure born by the free world.

Whilst the anti-war movement in the free world is apparently OK with events like Halabja and Russia’s bombing of civilians in Aleppo they might note that the people fleeing IS, Assad, AQ and the Taliban know who the good guys are and only flee to Europe and the US.

Comments welcome.