The rise of ISIS has demonstrated fully and conclusively how dangerous our president really is. He’s not just incompetent. He’s not just ideologically backwards. He’s actively dangerous. And it is in his denial of Islamic terrorism that he is at his most frightening.
It’s not just the way he talks. When he calls the Al Qaeda attack in Paris “random,” he’s not just using the first word that comes to mind. This is a choice of phrasing that has been defended by Josh Earnest. It has been defended by the State Department. This is a conscious, administration attempt to take the focus off Islam and pretend that we’re dealing with random, unconnected crimes.
If you need any further proof, all you have to do is look at the interview Obama did with Vox’s Matthew Yglesias last week. In it, he downplays these attacks, saying that they are best handled on a case-by-case basis by local law enforcement, the same way any other crime might be handled. Obama wants to move us past the age of terrorism so bad that he’s willing to simply pretend it doesn’t exist. ISIS is a cult of one type. Al Qaeda is a cult of another type. Boko Haram another. Islam has nothing to do with it. Political/religious aims have nothing to do with it. They’re just bands of serial killers, like Middle Eastern Manson Families.
If it were true that merely denying the existence of an anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-semitic radical Islamic movement would make it disappear, I would be all for the president’s efforts. Perhaps he was taught as a child that the best way to deal with a bully was to ignore them. That’s great advice, right up until the time that bully starts cutting people’s heads off. Then, it might be time to try something new.
You can call Obama a great American patriot, but it doesn’t make it so. By the same token, you can call ISIS a death cult that has nothing to do with the Islamic faith, but that won’t make it true, either. It wouldn’t matter what we called them as long as we were getting rid of them, but we’re not really doing that. We’re giving them lip service, dropping a few bombs for show, and turning the focus back to the president’s pet issues like climate change and illegal immigrants.
Maybe he refuses to engage the war on terror because he wants to selfishly stay on his agenda. Maybe he refuses because he learned a twisted view of the world from his father, Jeremiah Wright, and other early influences. Maybe he refuses because he’s scared. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he is exposing this country, its allies, and innocent people all around the world to danger by denying the truth. The problem isn’t going away. With Obama telegraphing U.S. weakness, it is only going to get worse.
