A lone journalist in a hostile place

Being a journalist can be dangerous. James Foley and Steven Sotloff knew that when they went to investigate the situation on the ground in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen and in Libya -- the sorts of countries where you can't find an all-inclusive weekend deal.

But these two American journalists knew that something important and meaningful is going on right now in the Arab world in general, and particularly in those countries. And in order to understand exactly what is happening -- there is no better place to be than on the ground. Even if it's dangerous. It's part of the job.

I did not know these two journalists, but I knew others who were killed on the job, like the French journalist who worked for television channel TF1, Patrick Bourrat. He was an excellent journalist who also worked in Israel. He was killed in Kuwait, a day before the second campaign in Iraq started (in 2003), when he was accidentally hit by an American tank.

Bourrat loved life. We were together in Kosovo, and at former Syrian President Hafez Assad's funeral in Damascus in June 2000. He thought that I, as an Israeli, was crazy for going to such countries. He interviewed me there, in the street, amongst thousands of Syrian mourners. He thought I was crazy, and yet, he was the one who was killed. It seems that luck is also a necessity in this profession.

Part of that luck -- if you are caught -- is ending up in the hands of somebody reasonable. It happened to me three times. Once I was arrested by Serbian forces in Vranje; once by American forces in the Iraqi desert near Karbala and once, by the undercover police in Syria during that same funeral. Thank God, these were all state authorities. Not a wild mob and not a terrorist organization.

Foley and Sotloff had the worst possible luck. Not only getting kidnapped, but getting kidnapped by the sickest, most barbaric organization in the world today, the Islamic State group, which is taking us back to the days of the Huns and the Vandals -- only scarier, because their inhuman behavior is being filmed and documented.

Sotloff had every "sickness" according to the Islamic State: American, Jewish and Israeli. A triple threat, as far as the terrorist organization is concerned. Sotloff managed to hide his Judaism and the fact that he held an Israeli passport, but even if the terrorists knew these things, I don't think they could have arranged a fate for him that was any more cruel than the one he received.

Journalists do not go into the field in order to never come back. In my 30-year career, I have not known journalists with death wishes. Foley and Sotloff obviously intended to come home safely. Their shocking deaths revealed precisely what is going on today in this region -- the radicalization of Islam.

There are four shocking things in the story of the Islamic State group, which should be noted even by those who wish to minimize the threat it poses:

The first being that hundreds of Muslims from Europe and North Africa joined the extremist group. That fact certainly does not paint a lovely pink future for the continent. One day, they will come home. With knives in hand. And just like in the Maghreb -- there are those who are hoping that the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in 2011 will lead to good things, like democracy. But in the end, the opposite happened -- the radicals and not the moderates grew stronger in the Maghreb.

The second is the collapse of Arab countries and entities, and the cancer of terrorism that is growing to fill the void. We are seeing this in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya -- and even in Gaza.

The third is the admission of the most powerful man in the world, U.S. President Barack Obama, that he has no strategy to deal with the Islamic State group. It's understandable. According to his plans, by the sixth year of his presidency there was supposed to have been a quiet calm world filled with good people. But good and evil existed before Obama and they will continue to exist after him. Once upon a time, it was clear that the good would kill the bad. Nowadays, it is more difficult to know what to do, since, according to the U.S. President's plan, there was not supposed to be any bad people. He also suggested in the early days of his presidency that Islam and terrorism are not linked. We still remember.

The fourth is the spread of the horrifying images online. The Internet was meant to bring us closer. We were promised to become a global village, but in reality that is not happening. The Internet, which was supposed to bring us together, is only bringing these horrors into our homes. We did not log into Facebook to watch beheadings. And yet, that is what is happening.

The NATO summit is expected to kick off this weekend. It will be interesting to see what the leader of the free world will say. Will he deploy troops to Iraq to get rid of this malignant growth called the Islamic State group? Will he flex his muscles at Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine? I doubt it.

The West is busy with wishful thinking, and in the meantime, radical Islam is writing one of the darkest chapters in history -- all on Obama's watch.

What exactly is Mr. President planning to do in the face of this barbarism? He doesn't know, so how should we-

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