I read an article by a journalist who has spent lots of time with the various rebel groups in Syria. He said every group he has encountered is happy about 9/11. So basically our strategy is, let’s arm and support the rebel group that is LEAST jubilant about the murder of 3000 Americans.

There’s no doubt that ISIS is incredibly evil. No question. They are committing terrible atrocities. They must be stopped.

However, let me provide a word of caution, in the interests of truthfulness (which, last I checked, is a biblical concept even for Facebook). Not everything you HEAR that they do is correct.

• The photo of three AK-47s being pointed at a little child? It’s from Yemen.
• That photo of eight persons being crucified by ISIS? It’s from the Turkish massacre of Christian Armenians in the early 1900s.
• That girl beheaded by ISIS? Actually, she was decapitated when a Syrian shell struck her home in 2013.
• That photo of a group of women in Mosul, hands raised, being led away by two gun-toting men to become ISIS slaves? Taken during a staged rescue of hostages during SOFEX, a special operations trade-show in Jordan.
• That photo of Mohammad Fazi, one of the Guantanamo detainees released in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, sitting behind five severed heads? Not him. It’s a Dutch national who ran off to fight in Syria. The photo was taken before Bergdahl’s release.

More recently, Christians have been circulating–since early August–an email about ISIS systematically beheading children in the city of Queragosh. The writer says ISIS is 10 minutes from where his team is working. It supposedly comes from someone named Bonnie Lang, who supposedly spoke by phone to Sean Malone of Crisis Relief International.

Actually, Sean Malone heads Crisis RESPONSE International, which DOES work in the areas in question. However, the CRI website says nothing about any of this. Another organization, the National Christian Foundation, quoted the email as coming from “our on-the-ground sources” and said it was keeping it anonymous “for security.” Actually, the anonymity was so they could falsely take credit for the report.

Demonizing the enemy happens in every war. During World War I, propaganda told of Germans throwing babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. America’s enemies convince citizens of the terrible things American soldiers will supposedly do to them.

ISIS is evil. They are massacring people. But that doesn’t justify spreading lies.

Dear news organizations: You can stop sending me News Alerts about a ceasefire agreement, followed a few hours (or minutes) later by a News Alert that the ceasefire has been violated. A simple “Ditto” will suffice.

This is an excellent piece by my friend Dave Schultz, written for his newspaper column. He and I tend to think alike on most issues (worship music being the prime exception). I particularly resonate with him when he writes, “I am always looking for the middle ground. Even when there is no middle ground to be found, such as in our current quandry, I keep trying to find it.”

There is quite a range of viewpoints on the gay-marriage issue in the church-going world–what is biblical, what are gray areas, what should be forbidden in the church but allowed in secular society, what attitude should Christians have. Dave navigates through a lot of those waters.

He hits some of the relevant nails head-on with this: “God hates divorce, but American society puts up with it — and that’s something, I think, that directly informs the same-sex marriage debate. Just because God doesn’t like it does not mean it should be subject to a societal ban.”

I’m passing this along as some clear thinking on the issue by a friend of high Christian integrity.

Kudos for capturing this Libyan fellow. I’m sure it took a while to compile the evidence for a definitive conviction. Glad the FBI was involved.

The FBI was involved early in the Afghan war. Captured terrorists were talking freely to the FBI. The FBI was interested in convictions, and was going about everything methodically and properly. But then Cheney engineered turning everything over to the CIA. The CIA didn’t care one bit about convictions–they just wanted information. And so, they used torture, launching one of the saddest periods of US history. It also accounts for our problems with trying the Gitmo detainees; the use of torture invalidates, under US law, most of the “evidence” against these guys. (The book “The Dark Side” tells all about this, including the enormous success the FBI was having in the early days until the CIA took over.)

But with this Libyan, we did it right.

The folks at FoxNews, of course, are putting the worst possible spin on this guy’s capture. They refuse to give President Obama credit for anything. I listened to The Five on the way home from work today, and I’m sick and tired of their constant negativity. I think I’m done with them. I’ll just listen to music. (The evening line-up at MSNBC is totally unwatchable, lest you think I have a double standard.)

Anyway, FoxNews advocates sending this Libyan to Gitmo and, though they won’t come right out and say it, torture the guy for information. Well, we don’t torture anymore–I’m deeply proud to say–so that won’t happen.

I’m guessing this guys WANTS to be sent to Gitmo. The alternative is spending his life in a Supermax prison, where a number of other convicted terrorists are already rotting away the rest of their lives. Supermax is a living hell, very inhumane. I’d prefer Gitmo, too.

It sounds like the FBI has the convictable goods on this guy. It’ll take a while, perhaps a couple years, to obtain a conviction. But the guy will be convicted and spend the rest of his life in a Supermax. He may be able to trade some information, but it won’t get him far.