Obama’s Terror Two Step
Obama downplays radical Islam while suggesting the U.S. is safer today.
Yesterday at a CNN sponsored town hall event with a heavy military presence, Barack Obama was asked by a gold star parent why he refuses to call radical Islamic terror “Islamic.” Obama responded, “These are people who’ve killed children, killed Muslims, take sex slaves — there’s no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that they do.” He then attempted to equate Christianity with Islam by saying, “If you had an organization that was going around killing and blowing people up and said, ‘We’re on the vanguard of Christianity.’ As a Christian, I’m not going to let them claim my religion and say, ‘You’re killing for Christ.’ I would say, ‘That’s ridiculous. That’s not what my religion stands for.’ Call these folks what they are, which is killers and terrorists.” In spite of voluminous and obvious evidence to the contrary, Obama’s blinding Islamophilia has prevented him from seriously engaging the religious ideology which motivates these radical Islamic terrorists. And that there aren’t Christians doing these things is somehow lost on him.
Similar to Obama’s blindness on Islamic terrorists’ ideological motivations are his rosy descriptions of the weakened condition of the Islamic State and terrorism. He declared that we’re “significantly safer today than we were when 9/11 happened.” Obama’s comments run contrary to those of his own administration. Also yesterday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in a panel discussion warned that the likelihood of a terror “attack is still there.” He said that there was no good way to calculate how many attacks may be coming and said, “People ask me, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ That is thing number one, the prospect of another home-born violent extremist acquiring a weapon or tool of mass violence and carrying out an attack somewhere here in the homeland.”
FBI Director James Comey noted that, in regards to the U.S.‘s ability to screen incoming Syrian refugees for potential terrorism ties or motives, “We can query our databases until the cows come home, but nothing will show up because we have no record of that person. … You can only query what you have collected.” Early this year FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach commented, “The concern in Syria is that we don’t have the systems in places on the ground to collect the information. … All of the data sets, the police, the intel services that normally you would go and seek that information [from], don’t exist.” National Intelligence Director James Clapper stated last year, “We don’t obviously put it past the likes of ISIL to infiltrate operatives among these refugees.” And this week, as the Democrats pushed for accepting more Syrian refugees Comey, warned of a “coming terrorist diaspora.”
With the rise of the Islamic State and the growing proliferation of its ideology, as well as the increasing number of terror attacks throughout western Europe and the U.S. since Obama took office, by what measure can Obama argue his continued success in the fight against Islamic terror? How has Obama built upon George W. Bush’s successes in defeating the enemy? Obama’s recent comments are reminiscent of his statements in 2012 before the Benghazi attack and the rise of ISIL — it’s nothing more than political narrative for him.