President Obama’s Failed Leadership in His War on Words (and “Thugs”)

On December 2, 2015, the Islamic State claimed more American lives, this time right here in America.  Will what is at least the eighteenth and deadliest terror attack on United States soil since 9/11 be enough to wake the nation from slumber?

It seems the Paris attacks awoke the nation, but not its President. French flag-filtered profile pictures and #prayforparis tweets aside, President Obama dismissed the sophisticated multi-pronged attacks – targeting a game attended by the French President, killing 129, and wounding hundreds – as a “sickening setback.”  How awake could this Administration really have been? At the time of the setback in Paris, Islamic terrorist Tashfeen Malik had already been in the United States – building bombs and planning attacks with her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook – for well over a year. And now we learn they were “radicalized” in 2013, long before Malik arrived, and that Malik provided a false address in her visa application (just days after the Administration defended its vetting procedures as satisfactory).  

But wait, did you even know the homeland has been attacked at least eighteen times?  This does not even include foiled attempts, some so-called “lone wolf” attacks undertaken by Islamists supposedly “radicalized” online or elsewhere (don’t forget the knife attack at a California college just last month), or the expanding plague of “honor killings.”

Our enemy is radical, but, the mainstream obsession with the term “radicalization” distracts from reality:  Children are radicalized, grown-ups like Malik and Farook make a choice.  I assure you, though, the “when, where, how and why” of radicalization, and the debate over whether attacks are “domestic terrorism” or “work-place violence,” however important these terms may be in a legal sense (and they are), means little to the dead, the maimed, or their families.  Yet, President Obama appears more engaged in semantics than destroying the enemy.  While the White House plays word games, Americans are dying.  How many more?

While President Obama employs semantics with skillful acumen, our enemy hones a skillful acumen of its own.  While President Obama insists with intransigent stubbornness that we identify and name our enemy by their geographic aspirations (ISIL), which include Israel, our enemy identifies and names the next target – perhaps in the Levant, perhaps in the United States.  Who knows? And that’s my point.

While President Obama mostly refuses to say the words “Islamic” or “Muslim” in connection to terrorism, our enemy pompously deems itself the “Islamic State” and waives its index finger and black flag with gloating and violent pride.  President Obama tells us the Islamic State is “contained.” But it spreads like deadly fungi in its sugar-addicted host.  President Obama drags his feet, while our enemy plants its feet on the ground in the next city.  And how did the President’s Attorney General  respond to the California massacre?  By attending a Muslim Advocates event where she announced that Americans will be prosecuted for anti-Muslim hate-speech – this, just two days after the attack.  Remember Secretary of State John Kerry distinguishing the Paris attacks from the Charlie Hebdo attack – because the Hebdo attackers had a “rationale”?  This is fairyland nonsense. 

President Obama calls out his critics for ‘popping off’ just days after the Paris attacks, demanding they put forward a specific plan.  Our enemy executes plans of their own.  President Obama panders.  Our enemy prepares and practices.  President Obama remains convinced Islamic terrorism is a law enforcement matter, a nuisance – a pesky distraction from his luminaire legacy.  Our enemy remains convinced it is at war.  While the scene in California was still unfolding, President Obama blamed guns and the next morning, he resorted to the predictable fallback of workplace violence.  As the White House’s war of words wages on, under the President’s leadership, our military declines to target Islamic State oil wells, for fear of damaging infrastructure and the harmful environmental footprint.  All fueled up and fat from oil sales, the Islamic State expands its own kind of footprint – a/k/a its caliphate – raping, mutilating, and burning anything and anyone in its path.

Reading conspicuously altered intelligence reports, President Obama arm-wrestles the intelligence community (and his Secretary of Defense) over the status of the Islamic State’s containment. Meanwhile, the Islamic State shows the world just how uncontained it is.  While the President wrangles with the FBI on what to call the San Bernardino attack, the enemy celebrates what it calls a victory.  President Obama is adamant that his strategy is the best.  So, it seems, is the Islamic State.  President Obama projects softness. Our enemy projects power.  President Obama exudes reluctance. Our enemy is anything but.  Truly, elections have consequences.  Devastating and painful consequences. 

While President Obama assures us that airstrikes, gun control and sensitivity will win the day, what steps has President Obama actually told us he is taking, right now, to protect the homeland? Well, besides assuring us he has the Islamic State “JV” squad contained, he engages in blaming Americans for anti-Muslim bigotry, pushing grander gun control (because terrorists obey gun laws and guns are the only weapons they utilize), warning that global warming climate change remains our gravest adversary (and causes terrorism), and ‘powerfully rebuking’ the Islamic State by boldly feasting at climate change festivities in Paris.  He’s also reengaged his old campaign promise of shutting down Guantanamo Bay.  That may be nice for the detainees (another of which, after being released, is now an al Qaeda commander), but however you feel about Guantanamo, this just isn’t the leadership and protection America longs for right now. 

President Obama just doesn’t get it.  The same day ISIS attacked Paris, President Obama pronounced that the Islamic State is “contained.”  As the ISIS-pledged terrorists prepared to attack San Bernardino, he proclaimed, “Right now, we know of no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.”

So please excuse my skepticism when, on Sunday night, President Obama addressed the nation insisting that his current strategy is working.  “The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it” he said, by making it harder for Americans to buy so-called assault weapons (because that makes it harder for terrorists to kill),  reformation of the visa waiver program (which was already underway in Congress), and a noodle-armed AUMF that will restrict his (and the next President’s) options for combatting Islamic terror.

But he didn’t stop there:  “We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam.” Instead, he opined, it’s just a war with mean-minded “thugs.”  While President Obama demands an indiscriminate America, the Islamic State executes an indiscriminate slaughter, paying no mind to geography, nationality, race, gender, or age.  There is no “war between America and Islam.”  This worn out straw man of discrimination serves as nothing more than a deadly distraction from the war at hand – the war being waged by jihadists on freedom loving people of all faiths. 

Even (or especially) after President Obama’s Sunday night address, I get the inescapable impression that the Islamic State thrives.  I wish President Obama showed the same vigor for destroying our enemy that he shows for gun control.  As wrong as he is, I at least sense the President’s passionate disgust for guns.  Where is his passionate disgust for evil?

In the meantime, while ISIS continues its jihadist rampage, other (but similar-minded) Islamic jihadists, like Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf, march on as well.  Peruse the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and you’ll get the idea.  

We desperately need real leadership, and President Obama consistently fails to deliver.  Don’t try to bring the Islamic State to justice like its Al Capone or Billy the Kid.  Destroy it.  We want ceaseless determination.  We want dynamism.  We need an interminable commitment to win.