Despite his best efforts to suppress, scrub and ignore the jihad threat, Obama was forced to take to the airwaves from the Oval Office on Sunday evening to discuss what he has prohibited discussion of: Islamic terror.
After a decade of jihad chaos here and abroad, Obama was forced to acknowledge the reality.
Post-Paris, he presented himself as a clueless clown railing about climate threats, but the San Bernardino slaughter was a game-changer for Americans. A methodical, well planned Islamic attack here at home, at a Christmas party, sent a very powerful message to the American people: you are not safe anywhere with a president seemingly indifferent to jihad violence.
Obama, despite the complicity of his running dogs in the media, has lost control of the narrative. He called Fort Hood “workplace violence.” He ignored the jihad slaughter in Garland, Chattanooga, Paris, the Russian jetliner and the University of California Merced. He called the Islamic State a junior varsity team.
He has blood on his hands. Obama scrubbed counter-terror programs and materials of jihad and Islam. If you can’t vet for that, intel failures are all but guaranteed. The money train and digital footprint is a stunning intel failure.
Now he has to distract from and defend his catastrophic failures. And so as he finally appeared to address an issue that he has ignored for the whole of his presidency, he said… nothing. He did finally call San Bernardino a terrorist attack. That’s how low our bar is. We have to applaud this elementary declaration.
He described the victims: “They were white and black; Latino and Asian; immigrants and American-born; moms and dads; daughters and sons. Each of them served their fellow citizens and all of them were part of our American family.” He made a glaring omission from his description, of the very thing they led to their murders: they were Christians and Jews.
Obama announced nothing new, but trumpeted his administration’s commitment to his failed course: airstrikes (which have been purely cosmetic and have done nothing to stop ISIS), financial sanctions (ISIS is the richest terrorist group in the word — with oil revenues filling their coffers daily), and support for his motley coalition of non-participatory actors.
He spoke, of course, about gun control. Yet California has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. The two San Bernardino jihadists were not on any terror watch lists, so nothing Obama proposes would have stopped Farook and Malik from getting their bloody hands on weapons.
His idea of not selling guns to anyone on a watch list is insidious. Obama officials could put you and me and on a watch list and thereby disarm us. No one sees those lists. They are secret. There is no oversight. An open advocate of the United States working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Elibiary, was a Department of Homeland Security official: he could have added anyone he wanted to this list when he worked there.
Obama insisted that he would not send in ground troops. Good. I would not want one American sent to his death because of Obama’s crippling and homicidal rules of engagement. We need a wartime president.
He spent a lot of time talking about not “discriminating against Muslims.” This entire premise is a lie. There is no discrimination against Muslims. His tongue flapped on about how “only a fraction of the billions of Muslims around the world” are not peaceful and don’t oppose jihad, when in fact Pew and Gallup and numerous other surveys state otherwise.
The bottom line? There was no change of strategy. Nothing. This was only the third Oval Office address of his presidency — they are reserved for events of national importance. He had the whole country all worked up about his big “ISIS speech.” Meaningless well-worn platitudes and lectures about our “Muslim neighbors.” Does Obama really think that huffing and puffing in the Oval Office is enough to meet the global jihad threat? He did not announce major changes to his plans to fight the Islamic State, even though that strategy was sharply questioned after ISIS claimed responsibility for the jihad attack in Paris last month, in which jihad murderers killed 130 people around the city. He said that the current strategy was supported by military and counterterrorism experts. In other words, he said nothing.
And of course, he repeatedly called the Islamic State “ISIL.” Why confuse the American people? Who calls it ISIL?
Emphasizing the frivolousness of Obama’s approach was this note from the Washington Post: “President Obama’s address to the nation on Sunday night will force him to be late to the 38th annual Kennedy Center Honors performance celebrating the achievement of five artists. The president attended a White House reception at 5 p.m. for Honorees Carole King, George Lucas, Seiji Ozawa, Cicely Tyson and Rita Moreno. After his 8 p.m. address, he is expected to go to the arts center for the remainder of the show.”
Never let a party go to waste! Neither blood nor flesh and bones nor jihad terror stays this president from the swift completion of his Hollywood party rounds. Obama has always been appallingly callous about jihad deaths: after Benghazi, he compared the Americans murdered there to his Las Vegas campaign workers. After the Fort Hood jihad massacre, he gave a “shout out” to some pals before making a statement.
One redeeming feature: for the longwinded blowhard that Obama is, this speech was shorter than many of his torturous answers to press corps questions. He has little to say about the gravest threat that this nation faces — a threat that has metastasized under his reign.
Obama referred to “this tragedy.” The San Bernardino jihad attack was not a tragedy. It was an act of war. A hurricane is a tragedy. A car crash is a tragedy. This is war.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.
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