Nightmares in Living Colour

"I'm back, Obama, and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy toward the Islamic State ... despite our serious warnings."
"So just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people."
Islamic State terrorist-slaughterer

A video showing U.S.journalist Steven Sotloff making what appears to be a pre-written speech in an unknown location is seen in this still image from video released by Islamic State September 2, 2014. The Islamic State released a video purporting to show the beheading of Sotloff, a monitoring service said on Tuesday, as the militant group raised the stakes in its confrontation with Washington over U.S. air strikes on its fighters in Iraq. REUTERS/Islamic State via Reuters TV

The scimitar, used as of old in Islam's campaign to proselytize and bring the glory of belief and surrender in Allah, would have represented a kindly, swift death in comparison to the use of the short, rough blade used by the ferociously Islamist lunatic who murdered first American journalist James Foley, and a week later, another American journalist, Steven Sotloff. That he was American was his death warrant; that he was also a Jew and an Israeli citizen was evidently unknown to his murderers.

That Steven Sotloff sought to bring to the world knowledge of the suffering of ordinary people whose lives were destroyed by the actions of the fundamentalist fanatics, parasites on the political ideology of Islam, seeking international attention through their barbaric atrocities was of little interest to the Islamic State, though his efforts did feed into their own political agenda. Which was to defy the world's acceptance of certain moral guidelines, respect for human life being foremost among them.

The Islamic State fanatics spurn all such guidelines as being an indifferent non-issue for their program of destruction and mass murder, in their zeal to cleanse the world of infidels, Jews, Crusaders and all those whose spurning of pure Islam offends them. Their genocidal plan to destroy ethnic and religious minorities as an affront to Islam calls for the destruction of all those groups seen by them as fodder for their campaign in the name of Islamist ideology of the pure and the faithful.

Amnesty International has pointed out the "ethnic cleansing" enterprise of the Islamic State in northern Iraq that targets indigenous religious minorities, the terrorists' platform to conducting mass killings of men and the abduction of women and children. Amnesty International's 26-page report speaks to the growing evidence of the scope and extent of the atrocities committed by the Islamic State with the initiation of its sweep from Syria into Iraq.

Now in possession of much of northern and western Iraq, to the very outskirts of Baghdad, they appear unstoppable. Unless and until the United States' administration makes a decision to become involved beyond securing Kurdistan and the safety of American personnel in the country, to repeat the involvement it had committed to in other countries with far less reasonable compulsion.

Steven Sotloff has paid the price for U.S. cautious involvement, and there will be others who die so horribly in reprisal by the Islamic State against the modest interventions of their country.

Slain American journalist Steven Sotloff was 'a gentle soul' who 'tried to find good in a world of darkness'