Free Rise of ISIS by Jay Sekulow Page B

off, waved it to the camera, shouted in victory, and motioned for the next terrified victim to come forward.
    How do we know this event occurred—one the mainstream media never knew about or reported? Because one of the authors of this book, a member of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) Law of War team who was deployed to Iraq at the time, saw the video with his own eyes. He walked through the streets of that village himself, stepping over bloody clothes. And he remembers. In fact, he can never forget.
    What was the name of that terrorist organization?
    Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI.
    And after al-Qaeda rejected AQI because of tactics such as this, tactics so depraved and brutal that they even repulsed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, what did AQI become?
    The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
    It became ISIS.
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    The sirens were some of the loudest noises I’d ever heard. They blasted apart the stillness of the day, assaulted my eardrums, and made me involuntarily duck.
    I was in Israel in 2008, just outside of the Hamas-held Gaza Strip. As chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, I was there (along with my son and coauthor of this book, Jordan) to meet with Israeli officials to discuss a response toutterly frivolous claims that Israel’s acts of self-defense against Hamas constituted “war crimes.”
    To help us make our case, I wanted to see Gaza with my own eyes, to see what life was like in southern Israel under rocket fire.
    I got more than I bargained for.
    When the warning siren went off, I knew I was safe. I was in a command bunker, meeting with key Israeli leaders. But my immediate thought wasn’t for my own safety; it was the same thought any father would have in the same circumstance.
    â€œWhere’s Jordan?”
    â€œWhere’s my son?”
    He hadn’t come down to the command bunker. Instead, he was outside, waiting, while I finished my meeting. From the moment the siren sounded until the moment the rocket hit, he had fourteen seconds to get to safety.
    Those were the longest fourteen seconds of my life.
    The rocket arced high into the air over Gaza. The Hamas rockets were less powerful back then, but the Iron Dome system that protects Israeli civilians today did not exist.
    In other words, that rocket wasn’t going to be shot down. It was going to land, somewhere close to us. Somewhere close to Jordan.
    It hit seventy-five yards from my son. By the grace of God, the angle of the impact combined with the shape of the charge drove the blast away from Jordan. He was unharmed.
    But for a few terrifying seconds, I lived the reality of Israeli fathers and mothers—someone was trying to kill my child.
    Not just trying, but exerting maximum possible effort.
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    Hamas has sworn not just to destroy Israel, the world’s only Jewish nation, but to kill Jews, to slaughter them. Its intentions mirror those of Hitler, even if its forces are not yet capable of the same kind of destruction.
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    That is life in southern Israel in the shadow of Hamas, a terrorist organization that digs tunnels with openings near homes and schools. The tunnels are designed to allow squads of terrorists to run out, kill, or capture sleeping families, and dash back to Gaza before even the most rapid-reacting and elite soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces can respond.
    Hamas kidnaps and murders children, sends suicide bombers to restaurants, and summarily executes anyone it believes has ties to Israel.
    Hamas hides its rockets and bombs in schools and mosques, builds tunnels under United Nations facilities, and often surrounds its fighters with children and other civilians, using them as human shields. It hopes that Israel will either refrain from firing on known terrorists or that, if Israel does fire, enough children will die for the world to express outrage against Israel. In other words, this organization launches rockets hoping to