Peter Kassig’s final months must have been terrifying. He knew what his barbaric captors intended for him, and that they were indifferent to suffering or pleas.
“I am obviously pretty scared to die but the hardest part is not knowing, wondering, hoping, and wondering if I should even hope at all,” he wrote in a smuggled letter, “Just know I’m with you. Every stream, every lake, every field and river. In the woods and in the hills, in all the places you showed me. I love you.”
President Obama, in his message to the nation, rightly said Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group.”
Perhaps unfortunately, though, the Islamic State is not a lunatic evil. It’s an ideological evil that has specific goals based on its versions of religion and history, which appeal to enough young men that the group fields an army.
If nothing else, Kassig’s murder reminds us of the stakes involved in the warfare in Syria and Iraq, and how — unless his killers are stopped — bad could go to worse.
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