President Obama’s policies toward the terrorist phenomenon have raised frustration and concern among Americans. But what may be more important is the impression terrorists get from Obama’s messaging.
President Obama’s public treatment of the terrorism issue has two parts. One is his portrayal of terrorists as victims, whether as victims of climate change, Western imperialism or xenophobic prejudice. The second part is his portrayal of Americans as provocateurs of terrorism.
President Obama adapts what may be called a view of religious chauvinism with regard to Muslim terrorists. He has stated that Western imperialism is responsible for outbreaks of terrorism around the world and has equated acts of terrorism with the acts of Christians during the Crusades. This is a difficult comparison to understand since the Crusades were only prosecuted to regain lost territory. At no time did Crusaders travel around the world and kill random groups of non-Christians in public places.
Of course the aggressive use of violence to promote any ideology is never acceptable, at least not in civilized societies. It is also unacceptable for anyone to accept or explain away violence perpetrated by violent jihadists either.
In just his third month as president, Obama toured the world on his famous apology tour. He apologized for acts of imperialist oppression perpetrated by America and presidents of the past. He did not say at the time that America is the greatest country in the world.
Perhaps his conception of terrorists as victims is what compels him to refuse to acknowledge violent acts of terrorism as what they are: expressions of radical Islamic jihadism. To this day, seven years into his presidency, he has never described terrorist acts as perpetrated by radical Islamic terrorists. Neither has Hillary Clinton.
He insists that terrorists are victims and has scolded Americans for not understanding that they feel victimized, and that this misunderstanding may lead Americans to delay allowing Muslim immigrants into the U.S. This is not what America is about, he has said. But he never portrays Christians or Jews as victims. A curious display of what some will see as religious discrimination.
For example, the murders at Ft. Hood were characterized as workplace violence even though the murderer, who was accepted into the U.S. military, shouted the jihadist words “Allahu akhbar” as he killed innocent people. The original Quran does advocate putting non-believers to the sword. However, many Westerners today are willing to accept that the sword verses are no longer seen by the majority of Islamic believers today as justifying violence. Many believers have evolved past the point of seeing the verses as advocating Jihad, or holy war. This is why terrorists who believe they should put the sword verses of the Quran into practice are seen as radicals.
Those who deny that the Quran’s verse of the sword can be used to justify violence need to explain why radical terrorists in the U.S. scream “Allahu akhbar” as they kill non-believers. And why the concept of Jihad is still very much alive and practiced today.
A recent study of U.S. Muslims found that one percent of U.S. citizens are Muslim. This places the number of Muslims at three million. If only one in ten thousand becomes radicalized online that places the number of potential radical Islamic terrorists at three hundred. However small the number may be, it only takes two or three to kill dozens, as events in Paris and San Bernardino proved. Three hundred is enough to create one hundred fifty events like San Bernardino involving two people. A former DHS security officer, Philip Haney, stated that his investigation of an organization that included the San Bernardino male shooter was shut down and the files, which could have potentially averted the San Bernardino shooting, were destroyed as “profiling.”
As a boy, Obama lived in Indonesia, which contains more Muslims than the Middle East. Seventy two percent of Indonesian Muslims favor making Sharia the law of the land. Obama has referred to having a Muslim faith, but has also stated that calling him a Muslim is an insult to Muslims in the U.S. He did state that while in Indonesia he spent two years in a Muslim school, but that he also spent two years in a Catholic school. Barack Obama’s father was a Kenyan Shiite Muslim.
If one dismisses his statement of Muslim faith, and rejects the other Muslim references as conspiracy theories, one is still left with his rhetoric of the past seven years. Additionally, while terrorism has increased, he has intentionally ignored Pentagon intelligence reports warning of terrorist developments, released some of the world’s worst Muslim terrorists from Gitmo, fought to promote a soft image for Muslims, and downplayed ISIS as a JV team that was already contained.
President Obama and his staff are experts at messaging. His 2008 presidential campaign was the first to extensively use social media, while his DHS banned, until recently, the use of social media communications as a method of detecting terrorist affiliations. During his two campaigns every word of his speeches were carefully phrased and displayed on teleprompters for him to read. There’s no reason to believe this sophisticated messaging is not being done now. And while $60 billion is spent by DHS every year, Obama has not enlisted the most brilliant minds in computer technology to shut down pro-jihad websites or make it easier to uncover them in this country.
What he has said and not said, and what he has done and not done, can all be read as signals to radical Islamic terrorists of his policy regarding terror. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
