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The list of crimes ISIS’s barbaric thugs then embarked on is well known, but bears repeating: Ethnic cleansing of minority groups, mass murder, rape on a horrifying scale, public execution of homosexuals and “adulterers,” and the enslavement of women and girls into forced marriages with ISIS fighters (or anyone with enough cash to buy one on the open market).

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To understand just how this strange state of affairs has arisen, it’s useful to unburden oneself of some of the great weight of pretty lies that Canadians are routinely told in order to disguise the disgrace of this country’s elites in their overall indifference to the suffering victims of Islamist terror. The first lie that would need to go is that Afghanistan is a quagmire, that we expended all that blood and treasure for nothing.

This fairy tale is immediately relevant to this week’s debates because the Taliban are the incubators, precursors and role models of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS), and breaking the Talibs’ grip on Afghanistan has opened up the brightest democratic space anywhere between Syria’s bomb-strewn Mediterranean coast and the outskirts of New Delhi. Some quagmire.

Some sense of proportion: The death toll of 158 Canadian soldiers during more than a decade of hard-won gains in Afghanistan is only slightly greater than the number of dead Muslims — 137 innocents at last count – butchered in a single jihadist suicide bombing last week at a mosque in Yemen. Some further proportion: the contribution Prime Minister Harper is making to the half-baked U.S.-led coalition is only another year’s modest commitment of a mere half-dozen Canadian fighter jets, a couple of Aurora patrol planes and a Polaris transport plane, a ground crew and a few dozen Special Operations Regiment advisers and trainers up in Kurdistan.