Rich Lowry:
President Barack Obama desperately wanted to be a peacetime president, yet is ending his second term with Islamic terror attacks looming larger than at any time since 9/11.
The tide of war isn’t receding, as he famously contended in a speech on the Afghan drawdown in 2011; it is lapping onto our shores.
The Left hates the notion that George W. Bush “kept us safe,” but after September 11 — a plot set in motion before he took office — Bush prevented another significant attack the rest of his presidency, at a time when a follow-on strike here at home seemed all but inevitable.
It was easy to take this achievement for granted, especially given that Bush’s success itself diminished the urgency people felt about the terror threat. But with two domestic terror attacks in the past six months killing more than 60 people and wounding more than 70, the long stretch of safety at home is harder to dismiss.
The rise of terror attacks within the U.S. — in addition to the mayhem in San Bernardino and Orlando, there has been a drumbeat of smaller attacks — corresponds with ISIS conquering and holding swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq. It isn’t a coincidence.
John McCain and other hawks warned so often during the Iraq War that if we retreated in the face of the jihadi threat overseas it would follow us home, the argument began to lose its force. But they were right. It is an iron law of nature that if a group like ISIS gets a safe haven, it will use it to train, recruit, and propagandize for terror attacks against the West.
In his long, widely cited piece about President Obama’s worldview, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic that President Obama “has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates.” When ISIS was beheading American hostages, Obama told top aide Valerie Jarrett, according to Goldberg, that “they’re not coming here to chop our heads off.”
True. They are instead reaching into the U.S. through their radicalized sympathizers to shoot up holiday parties and gay nightclubs. If it were an option, they surely would behead their victims as well. (In a knife attack in Oklahoma two years ago, a radicalized Muslim, Alton Nolen, did just that.)
President Obama’s view is that attacks like the one on the Pulse nightclub aren’t an existential threat. While he certainly doesn’t want them to happen and finds them horrible and wrenching, they are the implicit price of what he conceives as a prudently crafted anti-ISIS strategy — in other words, one that doesn’t have to show much urgency about defeating the terror group and limits the resources devoted to fighting it.
No, ISIS is not killing ALL of us, so ISIS is not an ”existential” threat.
However, when the Copts of Egypt were scared into voluntary Dhimmitude to the muslims there, they were not wiped out either.
They were just so scared that they buckled under and accepted Dhimmitude.
Read what Obama wants of us.
It is a major portion of Dhimmitude.
He wants us all to stop saying we are opposed to islam in any way shape or form.
He wants us to curtail our freedom of Speech, of Assembly, of the right to bear arms, of religion.
How did that go for the Copts?
Dhimmitude gives the submissive a false sense of security.
The Dhimmi Coptics still suffered having their daughters kidnapped, raped then forced to marry their rapists.
The Dhimmi Coptics still suffered having their religious buildings burned down.
The Dhimmi Coptics still suffered the looting of their homes and businesses.
The Dhimmi Coptics were often falsely accused of ”insulting islam” and mobs killed them.
The Dhimmi Coptics became the unpaid slaves of the muslims.
Listen to Obama’s words.
It starts with self-censorship and disarming.
He has already called for both.
The Copts still exist, but they are hardly free people.
So, the fact that we are not ”threatened existentially” is no great thing.
In islam slavery is necessary.
Slaves are allowed to live….if they stay in line.