Three days after the Islamic State’s terrorist attacks in Paris, Americans were primed to hear their president express heartfelt anger, which he did in his press conference in Antalya, Turkey, at the end of the G-20 summit. And they did hear him describe ISIS as “this barbaric terrorist organization” and acknowledge that the “terrible events in Paris were a terrible and sickening setback.”
But what really got him angry, as the transcript and video make clear, were reporters’ repeated questions about the minimal success of his strategy against ISIS; Republicans’ proposals for more active engagement in Syria and Iraq; and critics of his decision to allow 10,000 Syrians into the United States.
The reporters did not seem this time to be absorbing his patient instruction. ISIS “controls less territory than it did before,” he stated — but not much less, and it is still holding Iraq’s second-largest city and a huge swath of Iraqi and Syrian desert.
Our military could dislodge them, he admitted, but explained that then we’d have to occupy and administer the places we capture. In other words, we’d be facing the kind of messy situations we faced in Iraq.
But in his self-described goal, “to degrade and ultimately destroy,” the word “ultimately” looms uncomfortably large. Most Americans want people who behead Americans destroyed considerably sooner than that. They wonder why the world’s greatest military can’t do that.
Such action, Obama suggested, might be bad public relations. ISIS has “a twisted ideology” and we play into its “narrative” by treating it as a state and using “routine military tactics.” ISIS “does not represent Islam” and treating it as a “Muslim problem” will lead to “greater recruitment into terrorist organizations over time.” It’s not clear why the significant minority of Muslims with positive feelings to ISIS will accept an American president’s definition of their faith.
“A political solution is the only way to end the war in Syria,” he said, looking forward to negotiations between Syrian factions, encouraged that “countries on all sides of the Syrian conflict agree on a process that is needed to end this war.” But he felt obliged to acknowledge continuing disagreements over “the fate of Bashar Assad” — no small item.
He described Americans who counsel a different course as “folks (who) want to pop off” and who think their advisers are better than the Joint Chiefs or soldiers on the ground. This ignores the fact that Obama has repeatedly rejected the advice of career military leaders and his own appointed civilian leaders who recommended more active policies. …
This is not a president who has prioritized human rights in Middle East policy, as evidenced by the cold shoulder given to Iran’s Green Revolution protesters in June 2009 and the long inaction in addressing the problems of Syrian refugees, now flowing into Europe.
All of which makes more grating Obama’s denunciation of Americans who are critical of his call to admit 10,000 refugees here. In Antalya he accused them of closing their hearts to victims of violence and of being “not American” in suggesting prioritization of the Christian refugees who have been singled out for torture and murder.
He could have acknowledged people’s qualms as legitimate and argued at greater length, as former ambassador to Iraq and Syria Ryan Crocker did in the Wall Street Journal, that we have processes in place that would effectively screen out terrorists. Or have proposed, like Speaker Paul Ryan, a pause before accepting any.But that would have meant not taking cheap shots against the political opposition at home — the people who really make him angry.
What kind of person views the other political side as not just the opposition, but the enemy? Certainly no Republican president since Richard Nixon. Not even Bill Clinton, who because of his self-centeredness made political deals with whoever was in charge, Democrat (the first two years) or Republican (the last six years).
A comment made by one of President Obama’s closest aides explains his blasé attitude toward the lives of Americans. In late 2012, Neera Tanden, who had been one of President Obama’s closest aides, observed:
Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.
Barack Obama had been warned that leaving Iraq without a residual American force could lead to genocide. When questioned about this risk, he complacently answered that preventing genocide was not a good enough reason to have troops in Iraq .
Barack Obama’s coldness towards Americans — and others, for that matter — was obvious before 2012.
Barack Obama has long had an Empathy Deficit, as I wrote in 2010. He easily and coldly boasted he would destroy the coal industry and kill thousands of jobs with the aplomb of Chairman Mao and Josef Stalin reengineering their societies. The jobs that were promised after passage of the trillion-dollar stimulus plan never materialized because as Barack Obama jocularly put it two years later “shovel-ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.” When Texas was hit with devastating forest fires, Obama was cracking jokes at a California fundraiser, “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.” He has articulated his contempt for so called everyday Americans many times (see my 2012 column, What Obama Thinks of Americans and my 2014 column, Obama Thinks You Are Stupid, That’s Why)
Barack Obama seems particularly complacent when it comes to Americans endangered and murdered by Islamic extremists.
Here are some examples (with more undoubtedly to come as President Obama oversees a massive influx of Muslims into America, hence fulfilling his promise to “fundamentally transform America”). Obama’s Syrian asylum policy continues apace, despite the role of at least one Syrian “refugee” in the massacres in Paris. Obama wants to welcome at least 10,000 more Syrians into America (Hillary wants 65,000). What could go wrong? Ben Rhodes, Obama’s chief liar now that Susan Rice has outlived her usefulness in that role, appeared on numerous broadcasts to assure us these “asylum seekers” will be thoroughly vetted to eliminate security risks — contradicting the widely respected FBI chief, James Comey, who testified before Congress that vetting Syrian “refugees” will be challenging. Can’t we trust the competency of an administration who can handle the IRS, the VA, the stimulus program, green energy projects, and security of government employee records so well?
When Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered by Islamic terrorists the best that Barack Obama could offer was that his “loss” had “captured the imagination of the world.” Captured the imagination? Mark Steynhad some choice words for Obama’s lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl. There was no indignation or rage.
First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none. (snip)
Well, says the president, it was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination.” Really? Evidently it never captured Obama’s imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl’s fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: “one of those moments” – you know, like Princess Di’s wedding, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, whatever – “that captured the world’s imagination.”
After Barack Obama announced that American journalist James Foley had been beheaded by Islamic extremists he raced off to the links to yuck it up with NBA star Alonzo Mourning and others.
George Bush gave up golf as president because he felt it unseemly for a commander-in-chief to be playing golf while Americans were serving overseas in the military. Clearly Obama has different seemliness standards (see his interview with the YouTube comedian GloZell who bathes in milk and cereal in a bathtub).
When Americans were killed in Benghazi the White House refused to give an honest accounting of who murdered them (it was an offshoot of Al Qaeda). Their deaths were, in Obama’s cold phrasing, were not “optimal.” Well, they certainly weren’t optimal for him and his re-election campaign, so he and his Praetorian guard lied about their murders. Who got the blame? An obscure Coptic Christianwho had directed an equally obscure video that may have riled some Muslims — had they seen it (which, basically, no one had). The spin was that Muslims had been (“legitimately”?) enraged by the video that mocked Mohammed. Survivors were lied to and are still awaiting a call from the President to honestly explain why their loved ones had been murdered. They will be waiting a long time.
At times, he seems intent on justifying Islamic terrorism,or at least relativizing such violence by putting it in “historical context.” Last year, at the National Prayer breakfast (of all places) he invoked the Crusades while talking about Islam and terrorism:
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama noted there was a time when people mass-murdered in the name of Christianity, too:
And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
As many were quick to point out, the Catholic Church’s Crusades began more than 900 years ago, and the Inquisition began in the 13th century.
The comparison was absurd but part of a pattern of Obama being an apologist for Islamic terrorism. The violence perpetrated by Muslim terrorist never has anything to do with Islam in the rose-colored view of Barack Obama and his officials and they have all but covered up the role played by Islam in the murder of Americans.
John Kennedy wrote of Winston Churchill “he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Barack Obama has thumbed through the thesaurus and mobilized the English language in ways that George Orwell had foreseen — as a way for regimes to hide the truth from people. In this case, camouflaging an enemy.
The Muslim Brotherhood becomes a “mostly secular” group-this gem from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Islamic terrorist attacks become “man-caused disasters.” The 2009 Fort Hood massacre is described as a case of “workplace violence” despite the murderer, Nidal Hassan, having business cards describing him as a “soldier of Allah.” When a Chattanooga Navy recruitment center was attacked by Mohammad Abdulazeez, a Muslim who justified his attack because he was displeased by America’s war on terror (and therefore committed terror), the White House all but ignored the murder of our Navy personnel. Those murders merited almost zero notice. The White House has focused a lot of attention on violence on college campuses but was silent in the wake of the recent stabbing spree by Faisal Mohammed at a California university campus.
One wonders at what point, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, did American lives ever matter to Barack Obama? After all, his moral compass, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., celebrated 9/11 as America’s chickens having come to roost and routinely spouted anti-American diatribes as Barack Obama and his family stayed in the pews (Oprah Winfrey and others quit the church). Israel’s Ambassador to America, Michael Oren, read both of Obama’s books and what struck him the most was that Barack Obama never had one good thing to say about America. Not one. Is that what they teach at private prep and Ivy League schools or was that an ideology inherited from his parents?
Meanwhile, Barack Obama extolls the role of Islam in America and the world,fabricating history to do so. He also fabricates in real time, too: erasing the role as much as he can of Islamic radicalism in violence around the world. Indeed, “Islamic radicalism” and “Islamic terrorists” are banished from the lexicon of Obama and all his officials. If one cannot name an enemy it makes it harder to fight them.
Maybe that is the point. …
President Obama has an agenda that is becoming increasingly visible. Marc Thiessen recently wrote in the Washington Post of “Obama’s stubborn, willful complacency on terror”:
Somehow, to paraphrase President Obama, it has become routine— the president dismisses the terrorist threat, only to see terrorists carry out horrific attacks that give lie to his complacency.
On Sept. 6, 2012, Obama boasted at the Democratic National Convention that “al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat.” Five days later, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists attacked two U.S. diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
On Jan. 7, 2014, Obama dismissed the Islamic State as the “JV” team in an interview with the New Yorker, adding that the rise of the Islamic State was not “a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.” That same month, the Islamic State began its march on Iraq, declaring a caliphate, burning people alive in cages and beheading Americans.
Then on Thursday, Obama did it again, telling ABC News, “I don’t think [the Islamic State is] gaining strength” and promising “we have contained them.” The very next day, the Islamic State launched the worst attack on Paris since World War II, killing at least 132 people and wounding more than 350 others.
How many times is this sad spectacle going to repeat itself?
Well, chronologically, for at least one more year. Barack Obama is not interested in pursuing a war against radical Islam — he doesn’t think there is or should be a “war on terror” (another banished phrase) and seems more intent on burnishing Islam, even if it is at our expense and at the cost of our lives. Neera Tanden was right; he doesn’t like people and couldn’t care less what happens to (most) of us:our lives don’t matter.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 