“Leave ISIS To The Homies” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Despotism and populism finally coalesced. Driven by polls and craving plaudits from the pundits, the president cobbled together a strategy. Within hours, love was in the air again. Members of a lovelorn liberal media scurried about like teens on prom night. It had been a long time since they felt the same rush about Obama. In his televised address to the nation, the president committed to increasing the ongoing airstrikes in Iraq; said he would take the fight to ISIL in Syria, too. The hormonal monitors at CNN spiked with each paternal promise of protection. “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” roared Big Daddy. …

… Easily the most ludicrous aspect of Dr. Feelgood’s “plan” is the promise of “military assistance to the Syrian opposition”: “I again call on Congress, again, to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters.”

There is no telling the good Syrian opposition from the bad. If anything, there is a “growing preponderance of radical Islamists in the Syrian rebel force fighting Assad’s army,” seconds the outstanding intelligence provider DEBKAfile. Currently fighting ISIS is Bashar Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s embattled leader, whom Hussein, McCain and Clinton wanted to unseat.

The unseating of yet another extremely effective law-and-order leader, Saddam Hussein, is what unleashed ISIS. Despite what Delphic Oracle Dana Perino says in praise of her “prescient” boss’s “strategizing”; Bush 43 owns ISIS. Fidelity to historical fact demands that Bush get Brownie points for turning Iraq from a rogue state to a failed state, where mad dogs thrive. …

Read the complete column. “Leave ISIS To The Homies” is now on WND.

“Masada on Mount Sinjar” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Purportedly, forty thousand refugees, among them 25,000 children, were said to be stranded on the parched terrains of the Sinjar, in scorching heat, without sustenance. That is until Barack Obama broke up the gathering. Overnight. “That’s enough, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over.” Yes, the president and his minions have pronounced the catastrophe on the Sinjar Mountains over. However, just because the Obama machine declares it so, does not make it so. I would point BHO believers to Channel 4 veteran reporter Jonathan Rugman, who questions—even mocks—the administration’s rapid, fact-finding methodology:

Crisis, what crisis? The Americans have ruled out a military airlift of Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar on the grounds that the situation is not as bad as previously thought. … Are the Americans saying that the refugees are not spread out any more but have either been shepherded or moved into a concentrated area where they can be counted?

Let us, then, stick with Mr. Rugman’s findings, shall we? As the courageous correspondent has discovered, the Kurd-coordinated airdrops are executed by only four helicopters (one has since crashed), allotted by Baghdad. Emergency supplies are available in abundance at various nodal points; not so the means to deliver them. Priorities set by the central government do not include “rescuing a little known Yazidi minority in Kurdistan, a region which wants to break away from Iraq and become its own country.”

The Kurds assisting those marooned on the mountains would like to secede from the morass that is Iraq. Alas, the master puppeteers in Washington have hitherto been wedded to a unified (at the point of a gun) Iraq, dominated by a strong (sectarian and corrupt) central authority. This White House, and the one before it, fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage. …

… Read the complete column. “Masada on Mount Sinjar” is now on WND.

UPDATE (8/15): If there is one constant you can trust it is that he lies. They all lie. “Break it up, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over,” Obama announced to the world, Thursday. I guess the president was attempting to will a new reality with words. The American media bought it and scattered. I was quite comfortable that “Masada on Mount Sinjar” was closer to the truth than Obama’s agitprop, even though it was submitted before his “Yazidis disperse” injunction.

Indeed, the ISIS crisis continues. Thirty miles from Sinjar, on Friday afternoon, reports BBCNews, “Militants in northern Iraq … massacred at least 80 men from the Yazidi faith in a village and abducted women and children.”

MORE.

I hope the following unconfirmed rumor is true. Accordingly, “Israel may be attacking positions held by the terrorist Islamic State, or ISIS, militia,” in Iraq.

Israel is the region’s superpower, not the US. It should save its friends the Kurds, who’re besieged—dying or soon to die—in the north. The Kurds have been loyal friends to Israel, and vice versa. (See “Why Israel Wants an Independent Kurdistan.”)

For its part, “The United States military launched a humanitarian operation in northern Iraq Thursday night,” reports National Journal. “The military air-dropped food and water for thousands of Iraqis who have been under attack by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That drop is now over, and the aircraft that conducted it is out of the area, says the official.”

“Nearly all the displaced are members of the Yazidi sect,” seconds McClatchy, “ethnic Kurdish adherents to a religion that combines Islam and ancient Persian pagan beliefs and is considered heresy by the radical Sunni Muslims who make up the Islamic State. Since Islamic State militants took control of Sinjar on Sunday, there have been widespread, though unconfirmed, reports that Yazidis who failed to escape the takeover have been executed, tortured and raped.”

The United Nations said this week that at least 40,000 people, including 25,000 children, were in the Sinjar Mountains with no shelter, food, medical supplies and, most crucially, because of the brutal Iraqi summer heat, drinking water. While the mountains’ remoteness and barren terrain offers some protection from the Islamic State, the militants control all approaches to the area.

Local news outlets have reported that dozens of children and elderly already have died from dehydration and that thousands more could succumb if massive amounts of aid are not delivered. Efforts to confirm those accounts by dialing the cellphones of people believed to have fled into the mountains failed, most likely because after days without electricity the cellphones’ batteries have died.

This is the face of real religious persecution; this is what authentic refugees look like. Let us hope Israel rescues its Kurdish friends.

UPDATE: Do I want Israel to be involved militarily in fighting for the Kurds? No. It can drop supplies and air lift those poor people to safety. They should. They did this before for roughly 36,000 Ethiopian Jews, who were lifted to safety in a series of daring operations initiated by successive Likud governments headed by Menachem Begin and then Yitzhak Shamir. It’s hard to imagine an American government doing the same for say, white, persecuted, Christian farmers in South Africa or Zimbabwe, who are no less oppressed than these Ethiopian Jews were by the brutal Marxist-Leninist Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, at the time.

Will I shed tears and twist into ideological pretzels over Israeli counter-aggression in the service of the Kurds? No.

“American Rabbis For Israel First” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Here is an angry and cogent Israeli response to incessant provocation and violence, and one of the factors that triggered the Gaza campaign,” wrote a reader. In his missive, the reader had attached an article for my edification. Chief among the problems with the article is that its author, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, is not an Israeli. Rabbi Boteach is an American. Online, he describes himself as “‘America’s Rabbi,’ whom The Washington Post calls ‘the most famous Rabbi in America.”

Rabbi Boteach’s Huffington Post defense of Israel titled “Fed Up With Dead Jews” is thus not an “Israeli” response to the latest flare-up between Hamas and Israel, but a Jewish-American one.

Mistaking a Jewish-American defense of Israel for an “Israeli” one is understandable. When it comes to things Israel, very many American Jews sound like Israelis. While one would expect an Israeli to vigorously defend his homeland, in theory and in practice, one does not expect an American—Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or Baha’i—to defend the interests of a foreign country, with the intensity ordinarily reserved for one’s own.

In “Fed Up,” Rabbi Boteach inveighs: “We have every right to be fed-up. No nation should have to live like this. No nation should have to die like this. … what we do know is that the option of dead Jews is no longer acceptable. We have a right to live.”

Rabbi Boteach and Israel are as one.

Far be it from me to question the Rabbi’s capacity to commit to two countries. Seamlessly does Boteach spread passion and “Kosher Lust” (his new book) wherever he goes. In question here is the unseemliness of dual patriotism; the conflict of interest, if you will. …

… Contra Boteach, my own passions are tempered by time and place. I live in America. My neighbors are American. This is my home. I may be a Jew, but I’m an American patriot first. My loyalties lie with my (war-weary) countrymen, first. …

… An American writer’s intellectual energy ought to focus on American interests, first. Personal probity demands it! Otherwise, the columnist is a fifth column. …

… Read the complete column. “American Rabbis For Israel First” is now on WND.

UPDATE: GOOD COLUMN; BACK PAGE. From the Facebook Thread:

Kerry Crowel: “Whoa … Ilana, that is one hell of a good column.”

Ilana Mercer: “Kerry Crowel, thanks. I thought so. But it’s on second page, as usual, on WND. Second page is more or less the rule for one of the site’s longest standing columns. When thinking of where to publish next book, one takes into account the kind of promotion the column gets. Or no promotion, rather. But thanks for your kind comment.”