Fighting against ISIS

In the past few days reports have come out about British citizens, some of whom are of Kurdish extraction, others not, travelling to Syria explicitly to fight ISIS.  They make it clear they are not being paid, in part for legal reasons, but their decision to take on ISIS directly, and bravely, has confused the Home Office.

One report involves two British men who have allegedly gone to defend the Syrian town of Kobani from ISIS, another involves a teenage girl of Kurdish descent and yet another of a group of retired soldiers who have gone to fight.

The reason for the confusion is the moral equivalency that has been granted between ISIS and its Kurdish opponents, although David Cameron has confidence that the UK Border Agency can tell the difference.

I don't share his confidence, particularly when it comes to Kurds who wish to fight, who may be assumed to be aligned to the Marxist-Leninist PKK separatist group based in Turkey.  Given there has been absolutely no terrorist activity in the UK aligned to Kurds, they ought to simply be left alone.

In New Zealand of course, you can't go off as a mercenary to fight ISIS, because the Clark Government, encouraged by the Greens, and also supported by Jim Anderton and Peter Dunne. National and NZ First opposed the legislation and you can read here the banal background as to why it was supported, though it is telling that the only member of the Select Committee who is still an MP is Peter Dunne.

The legislation was a codification of the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.  In other words, a time when the left thinks it is just dandy to bind the New Zealand Government with an international treaty (when it complains like rabid dogs about trade treaties).   Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA have not ratified it, which to Labour and the Greens just makes it all the more important, as part of their desire to not align themselves with western civilisation, but with the likes of Turkmenistan, Qatar and Libya.  

Apparently, the New Zealand Government wants a monopoly on you using force to defend people in other countries, which of course means it almost never happens, given it has very little capability to do so.

Lifelong appeaser of murderers, Keith Locke, continues to think that the way to deal with people who behead men, women and children, is to talk to them.  I suggest he gets on a plane to show us how it's done.  One can imagine he would have done the same to the Axis forces in World War Two, which is not only naive, but dangerous in weakening resolve against those out to kill us.

The real point is that it is wholly moral for anyone capable to go to Syria and fight ISIS.  ISIS is morally equivalent to Nazis, it is genocidal, it is brutally totalitarian and utterly ruthless.  It is particularly loathsome for the UK, or any country to tell people they can't defend Kurds in Syria from ISIS, whilst that very same government does absolutely nothing to stop it.

New Zealanders, also, should be able to go.  However, they would be committing a crime if they did, thanks to Peter Dunne, the Labour Party and the Greens.

It is time that the Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Act 2004 is repealed, or at the very least amended to explicitly exclude anyone fighting against proscribed terrorist organisations or (even better) paramilitary organisations or governments that are engaging in similar such acts against civilians.

Those fighting ISIS are heroes, for they are fighting medieval barbarity, they are fighting for civilisation.