Islamic terrorists are the world’s eighth largest military.

Islamic terrorists are a “tiny minority of extremists”. That’s the message we’ve been hearing ever since 9⁄ 11 . They’re only a handful of “guys in a cave” or a few “lone wolves” radicalized over the internet.

How tiny is that tiny minority?

According to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, there are 230,000 Jihadists.

Put this tiny minority of extremists together in a city and you would have Boise, Idaho, or Richmond, Virginia, or Des Moines, Iowa. But that’s not a roster of Muslim civilians who support Islamic terrorism, just active members of terrorist groups. And so a better point of comparison is to national armies.

At 230,000, Sunni Islamic Jihadists outnumber the British Armed Forces (149,000), the French Armed Forces (117,000), and Germany’s Bundeswehr (179,753). That should be troubling since those are some of the militaries and countries on the front lines of Europe’s reluctant fight against Islamic incursions.

The list of Sunni fighters has a lot of questions marks and is incomplete. Sunnis outnumber Shiites, but under the Iranian umbrella, Shiites have fielded sizable terror forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.

Hezbollah in Lebanon boasts between 25,000 to 65,000 Jihadists. The Houthis in Yemen, currently the beneficiaries of a massive propaganda campaign in the media, have around 25,000 to 30,000 Jihadists. Iraqi PMU’s add another 90,000 to 150,000 Jihadists to these numbers. And finally there’s Iran’s own Revolutionary Guard, a regional terror hub with another 120,000 members.

These numbers add between 260,000 and 365,000 Jihadists on the Shiite side for a total of over half a million Sunni and Shiite Jihadists making Islamic terrorists the world’s eighth largest military.

That’s not a tiny minority of extremists and it’s not a few guys in a chat room or a cave.

This dark army of terror grew by leaps and bounds under the Obama administration which fractured Sunni countries by overthrowing their governments in and bringing Islamists to power in the Arab Spring, while the Iran nuke deal fed and freed up billions for Iran to invest in Shiite expansionism.

The CSIS report notes that the number of Salafi Jihadists and allied terror groups more than doubled between 2008 and 2016. Despite the Iraq War, during Bush’s second term, the increase was fairly light. The stratospheric increase, from the thirties to the sixties, took place during the Obama years.

The estimated number of Jihadist fighters rose from a high of 100,000 in 2008 to 250,000 in 2016.

The mass deaths in Syria, Libya and Yemen (to name some of the worst Arab Spring trouble spots) are a direct result of the policies and, in Libya of the military intervention, of the Obama administration.

Lefty twitter brims with propagandas photos of supposed Yemeni children starving to death. The media has tried to blame the religious war between Sunnis and Shiites (and their Saudi and Iranian backers) on President Trump. But dead children in Yemen are the wages of the foreign policy of Hope and Change.

As the Democrats and the Republican foreign policy establishment advocate for Jamal Khashoggi, intervention in Syria and support for the Palestinian Authority, it is urgent to remember that these are the same old failed policies that led to a 150% increase in Jihadists and killed over 500,000 people in Syria, and cost the lives of tens of thousands more in Yemen and Libya. And elsewhere in the region.

“Democratization” is a poisoned Islamist chalice. At its cloudy bottom lie terror and death.

The media has accused President Trump of a callous indifference to human life for putting American national interests ahead of Khashoggi, an Islamist pal of Osama bin Laden. But it’s the media radicals whose horrid idealism put half a million people into the ground in the service of the region’s Islamists.

Khashoggi’s Islamist political agenda killed enough people to qualify as its own genocide.

Half a million dead and half a million Jihadists rampaging around the world are the outcome of an idealistic foreign policy in which chattering class lefties allowed Islamists like Khashoggi to call the shots. The tiny minority of extremists was never that tiny, but it grew to a monstrous size with massive infusions of cash and military interventions plotted by Islamists and implemented by Washington D.C.

Many of the 70,000 Jihadists in Syria were directly or indirectly funded by the Obama administration. As were many of the 5,000 Jihadists in Libya, where Obama’s illegal military intervention led to everything from a near Al Qaeda takeover of Mali to the flow of surface-to-air missiles to Hamas terrorists.

Major terror groups and state sponsors of terror from Pakistan to Iran to the Palestinian Authority also saw huge cash transfers from American taxpayers to Islamic terrorists.

In his first year in office, Obama signed off on a $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan. The Islamic terror state repaid us by harboring Osama bin Laden and aiding Islamic terrorists killing American soldiers.

This year, President Trump made drastic cuts to foreign aid to Pakistan after tweeting, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools.”

We’re still foolishly funding Jihadists, including the tens of thousands of members of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, even after their leader, Abbas, called for the destruction of the White House.

CSIS doesn’t list the Islamic terror militias in the Terrorist Occupied Territories in Israel. That leaves the tens of thousands of Jihadists in Hamas, Fatah and other Palestinian Authority TOT terror groups out of the calculations. These groups are not just a threat to Israel. Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and is backed by Iran. Its skills and resources are at the disposal of allied terror groups.

That’s how Iran’s Hezbollah assisted Al Qaeda in its preparations for 9⁄ 11 . It’s why Iran is aiding the Taliban today. An Islamic terror group or terrorist anywhere is a link in a global terror network.

That is the understanding that made ISIS so deadly, striking from Iraq to Paris to New York.

Islamic terrorists are not a tiny minority of half a million. They are not an aberration. They are everywhere. And the failed foreign establishment funded and aided many of them.

Military interventions spread them, democratization brought them to power and immigration transplanted them from war zones into our countries. Their numbers have more than doubled in a decade. If the Left gets to set foreign policy again, in another generation there will be millions.

If we want to avert that outcome, our interventions, regime change and immigration policies must all objectively meet the test of making societies, including our own, less Islamist, not more so. Foreign aid should be barred by law from going to any country or militia whose goal is to establish Islamic theocracy by force. Any intervention must be objectively shown to make a society less bound to Islamic law. And immigration policy must be aimed at reducing the percentage of Islamists in the United States.

Otherwise the next Islamic civil war won’t be fought in Syria, but in the United States of America.