Portrait of a young boy with one half of his face painted with the Union Jack of Great Britain and the other half with the Flag of the USA.
In the United States, 2017 media coverage has been dominated by the Russia collusion story, tax reform, Obamacare repeal and the President’s daily tweets. What has been missing however from the reporting of CNN and the pages of The New York Times and Washington Post has been in-depth coverage and recognition of developments 6,000 miles away in the Middle East.
The most significant story of the year (and one of the biggest of the decade) is the emphatic defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, a massive setback for Islamist militants and their murderous ideology. The Islamic State and its followers remain a major threat in North and East Africa, parts of the Middle East, and in Europe, but their caliphate stretching from Mosul to Raqqa has been almost completely decimated…
- According to the US State Department, just 2% of territory once held by ISIS remains in their control.
- ISIS lost 50% of its territory in 2017 alone, with five million people liberated in the last 12 months.
- A total of 7.7 million people have been freed from the brutal grip of Daesh since Operation Inherent Resolve began.
By any measure this is a huge achievement. This may go down in history as the year when the free world finally turned the tide against the Islamist menace. And none of this would have been possible without American leadership with the support of key allies like Great Britain. The world is a safer place when the United States is prepared to lead, and Britain is prepared to fight alongside it.
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Introduction to this Under-reported series.
Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.
Nile Gardiner directs the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. He is a former aide to Margaret Thatcher.
NileGardiner 
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SubscribeMary writes of an alternative between the kind of conservatism favoured by Burke, democratic institutions with a healthy respect for traditional values, and the kind favoured by de Maistre, submission to an absolute monarch and the Pope. Tough call, but I think most people faced by such a binary choice would opt for Burke. She doesn’t seem to have much use for continental leaders like Orban in Hungary and Salvini in Italy. Other people have more time for them. Daniel Pipes, who is not a Christian, but a Jew, has argued (see “In Defense of Europe’s So-Called Far Right”, January 29, 2015, and subsequent updates) that far right parties in Europe are more appropriately labelled “civilizationist”. They stand up for the civilization they have inherited against encroaching Islamism. Mary chooses to call that civilization Christian, a lot of people would maybe prefer to define it as Judaeo-Christian. What Pipes would call civilizationist parties certainly have their authoritarian issues, but they aren’t authoritarian parties per se, and there has been a distressing tendency to authoritarian measures by parties of the so-called centre-left as well. In her own screed, Mary mentions “Islam” only once in the context of anti-Islam rallies by Pegida in Germany, where people carried crosses and sang carols. However, there is surely a much broader coalition of people than that who would be opposed to the replacement of European civil law traditions with shariah law, the expansion of Islamic finance and so forth. For that matter, it is an agenda that should appeal to many moderate Moslems. In Ontario, Moslem women were among the leaders in the fight against sharia law in our province, when Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty sought to expand their application. Mary really should give this matter some more thought.
The apparent conflict between religion and science is surely apparent rather than real. The former answers questions about meaning and the latter tells us how things work. A secular scientist who has an excellent understanding of this difference is the American string theorist Brian Greene. He articulates this difference and seems totally unthreatened by religion.
I am not sure why some atheists such as Polly Toynbee are angered by religious belief and seem to think it should not be a right.