The Patriot Post® · The Islamic Threat — It's Already Here

There are varying opinions about the threat the Islamic State poses in the Middle East and Europe, and apparently there is no consensus about the coinciding Islamic threat against U.S. domestic targets.

That confusion was on full display from the White House to Capitol Hill this week.

After three Islamists were arrested in New York for plotting to either join 20,000 other foreigners now among ISIL’s ranks, or turn their sights on domestic targets, FBI Director James Comey warned, “We have investigations of people in various stages of radicalization in all 50 states. … This isn’t a New York phenomenon or a Washington phenomenon, this is all 50 states. … [Radicalization prospects] exist in every state. I have homegrown violent extremist investigations in every single state.”

Apparently, the primary domestic terrorists threat is not “right wing,” as errantly asserted by DHS on the heels of Barack Obama’s faux Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.

That notwithstanding, after a very bloody year, John Kerry had this to say in congressional testimony: “Our citizens, our world today is actually, despite ISIL, despite the visible killings that you see and how horrific they are, we are actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world – less deaths, less violent deaths today – than through the last century.”

Kerry took a break from more important business like announcing the first-ever Special Envoy for the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender Persons, to spin Obama’s blinding Islamophilia on the Islamic threat.

A day after Kerry’s testimony, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper demolished the Obama/Kerry assessment, and set the record straight: “When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled. … In my 50-plus years in the intelligence business, I don’t know of a time that has been more beset by challenges and crises around the world. I worry a lot about the safety and security of this country. … The homegrown violent extremists continue to pose the most likely threat to our homeland.”

Former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was already on record chastising Obama’s Islamic blind spot, also buried Kerry’s assessment: “Secretary Kerry is out of touch with reality. He clearly is not listening to the entire U.S. intelligence community. He is not reading any of the intelligence or other things that have been written over the last few weeks – months – years.”

It is abundantly clear that Obama’s assessment of ISIL as the “JV team,” and his assertion that concern about terrorism is the result of “media hype” and not actual threats, has no basis in reality.

National Journal’s left-of-center Ron Fournier admits, “What worries me is, I think we’re going to get hit. [Islamists are] going to hit us… The problem is these semantic gymnastics, this lack of clarity, the dithering … is going to make it hard for [Obama] to unite more than his base. … [Obama] is either spinning and looking weak … or he’s not spinning and he is weak. That’s a devil’s choice.”

But Charles Krauthammer concludes, “I don’t actually think the president’s spinning it. I think he truly believes that this is a tranquil era. … I think he’s internally placid about all of this. … I think we really have a president who believes that stuff and it’s not spin and that, I think, is worse.”

Meanwhile, ISIL’s rampage continues apace. The terrorist group this week abducted at least 220, but some estimates say as many as 400, Christians. Fifteen have reportedly been killed. Following last week’s massacre of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, ISIL’s attacks on Christians and all nonbelievers are clearly accelerating. Obama thinks they’re just angry about the Crusades.

As for the domestic terrorist threat, while the media refers to these deadly assaults as “lone wolf attacks” and a “homegrown Western threat,” these are dangerous mischaracterizations. All these actors, whether domestic or foreign, are part of an ideological Islamist web that is metastasizing globally.

Obama’s appeasement of Islamists has resulted in the bloodiest year of terrorism on record. And as Mark Alexander notes, “[R]egarding Obama’s attempt to pivot from the threat of a global Jihad caliphate to ‘climate change,’ I assure you that the real "global warming” threat we face today is an apocalyptic trigger on an evermore accessible fission weapon that can be detonated in an American urban center.“