ISIS, Hamas, Boko Haram: Believe them

(CNN) - Grim, unyielding and violent reality is beginning to confront the American political establishment with facts from which it cannot hide. For 35 years, since Iranians seized the American Embassy on November 4, 1979, and kept the Americans in it as hostages, the United States has been at war with radical Islamists. They knew it. We hid from it. Year after year since then, radical Islamists have grown more militant, more sophisticated and more numerous. Now, in an arc of terror from Boko Haram in Nigeria through Hamas in Gaza to ISIS in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, there is a clear wave of vicious religious warfare being waged against civilization by fanatics who openly promise and engage in genocidal killing. To understand why I link ISIS, Hamas and Boko Haram, consider the language of their own statements. Why not take them at their word? ISIS has made its murderous intentions painfully clear. It has proven in town after town that it will force people to convert to Islam or it will kill them in numbers that are now being called genocidal. As President Obama said in his speech Thursday night, "Many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the danger of being wiped out." The group has also made clear that it views its mission as a worldwide war. "I say to America that the Islamic caliphate has been established," a spokesman for the group said Thursday. He warned that the group will attack America and "will raise the flag of Allah in the White House." "Don't be cowards and attack us with drones," he said. "Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere."