White House aides were reaching for the Maalox [Tuesday] as their messaging strategy clearly went off the tracks. While Obama was in Paris this week marshaling world leaders to tackle the threat of climate change, his top defense chiefs were on Capitol Hill asserting that Islamic terrorism is a greater danger to our country.

During a House Armed Services Committee hearing [Tuesday], Rep. Ryan Zinke, a retired Navy Seal commander, asked Secretary of Defense Ash Carter whether ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups represented the most imminent and dangerous threat facing the country today.

“Yeah, that certainly is the one that is the most imminent,” Carter answered. “They’re trying to attack us right now — there is nothing distant in time or probability about it.”

General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also testified before the House Armed Services Committee. Consider this exchange between Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) and General Dunford:

FORBES: Have we currently contained [ISIS]?

DUNFORD: We have not contained [ISIS].

FORBES: Have they been contained at any time since 2010?

DUNFORD: … Strategically they have spread since 2010.

So while Obama claims to have ISIS contained and frets over climate change, his own secretary of defense says ISIS is the imminent threat and the Pentagon’s top general says ISIS is spreading its poisonous doctrines.

Wrong Narrative

Secretary Carter and General Dunford weren’t the only ones taking issue with Obama’s grasp of the terrorist threat [Tuesday].

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Obama’s director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the White House ignored intelligence reports on ISIS because “they did not meet a narrative the White House needed. And I’ll be very candid with you, [the reports] just didn’t.” Lt. Gen. Flynn was certainly in the right position to know.

But the White House and its allies repeated their narrative over and over again during the 2012 campaign — that Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups were “decimated” and “on the run.”

When Benghazi demonstrated otherwise, administration officials claimed that it wasn’t terrorism but a protest over a video. When ISIS began conquering territory for its caliphate, Obama dismissed it as the “JV squad” or junior varsity team, and so we didn’t need to worry about it. The greater threat, in Obama’s mind, is climate change.

Western Civilization is engaged in a war against radical Islam that Obama is simply unwilling to fight. As liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen put it this week, “If the Obama of today and not Winston Churchill had led Britain in World War II, the Old Vic theater would now be doing ‘Hamlet’ in German.”

Swarms On Rooftops

The saga of Muslims in America celebrating the 9/11 attacks continues. On September 16, 2001, just five days after the attack, a local New York CBS affiliate filed a story about an FBI raid on an apartment building in Jersey City. Consider this excerpt from that CBS story:

“… [T]here is another apartment building, one that investigators told me, quote, was swarming with suspects — suspects who I’m told were cheering on the roof when they saw the planes slam into the Trade Center. …

"The FBI and other terrorist task force agencies arrived, and the older investigators on the task force recalled that they had been to this building before, eight years ago, when the first World Trade Center attack led them to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, whose Jersey City mosque lies between the two buildings getting attention today… Calling this a hot address, the task force investigators ordered everyone detained.”