VDH:
When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.
But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama’s remedies proved worse than the original illness.
Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America’s strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.
The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.
Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word “terrorism,” was airbrushed from the new administration’s vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disaster” and “workplace violence.”
In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.
Yet Obama’s outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic “violent extremism.”
Careerist toadies in government parroted the party-line message and even tried to outdo their politically correct boss.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano focused on returning veterans as terrorist risks. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said that global warming, not the Islamic State, was the real threat. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the president asked him to make Muslim outreach a top priority for the agency. CIA Director John Brennan said that jihad “is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam.” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper opined that the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular.
The president often blamed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for needlessly provoking Islam. Obama said that terrorist dangers were no more deadly than falls in bathtubs. He wrote off the Islamic State as an inept jayvee squad, assuring that they posed no existential threat. He campaigned on the premise that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama pulled all troops out of Iraq, which instantly degenerated into chaos.
Obama kept insisting that guns, not Islamic terrorists, were the real danger — even as assassins used bombs from Boston to Paris, knives from California to Oklahoma, and, most recently, a truck to run over innocents in Nice, France.
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more about charges of “Islamophobia” than preempting deadly terrorist attacks. Authorities had either interviewed and then ignored the Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando terrorists, or they had blindly ignored their brazen social media threats.
There was never cause for such weak-horse contrition.
Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants — even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.
Think the invasion and occupation of 2 Islamic countries might have pissed them off also?
Think having as one of our firm allies Saudi Arabia that has one of the most extremist of all Muslim’s sects as their national choice anything to do with it ?
Gulf War I. Was to save the Daudis and the Gukf Oil Sheks from Saddam, was that a mistake?
What if he had spread secularism in the Mideast? Woukd that have been bad if he crushed religious extremism?
Obamas dreams must have had them while on a LSD trip