Iran’s president brought an unsettling message to the United Nations on Thursday: Middle Eastern terrorism has been globalized, in part thanks to mistakes made by Western powers, and the threat cannot be eliminated by outside force alone.
President Hassan Rouhani, feted at last year’s U.N. General Assembly as a welcome change from his combative predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told the world body that his part of the world is “burning in the fire of extremism and radicalism.”
He said the world now faces terrorism from “New York to Mosul, from Baghdad to Damascus … from al-Qaida to Daesh,” using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which calls itself the Islamic State.
The only thing the West has done to help spread terrorism is educate the terrorists and teach them to fly and funnel money internationally. The terrorism spreads through that, not because of it. It spreads because this is a religiously inspired hatred that will never stop spreading on its own. It has to be stopped by the people it seeks to destroy.
Here is hoping the world, especially the US, one day soon gets leaders who have to stomach for it.
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