Obama The Terror Warrior

Following Barack Obama's UN speechifying about Palestinians and other terrorists, it is probably an appropriate time to revisit the Obama administration's alleged counter-terrorism policy. To summarize it, he doesn't have one. Like J. Edgar Hoover refusing to recognize the existence of the Mafia and organized crime, Obama thinks in terms of individual criminals and criminal acts.

It's easier and more comfortable to think of using the vast resources of American law enforcement and the military to track down one high-profile international criminal like Osama bin Laden than it is to think in terms of using those same resources to break the back of organized terrorists or fight a war against jihadism. It's easier and more comfortable to pat oneself on the back for having captured or killed a single criminal than it is to recognize the need for 24/7 vigilance in fighting a huge multi-national amorphous yet hydra-headed enemy.

Like the Lernean Hydra, when you chop off the bin Laden head, others grow to replace it. The entire beast must be killed and the stumps of its heads seared with fire before a victory can be claimed. And since Obama is no Hercules, and "victory" has become a dirty word, his counter-terrorism program is the same old liberal war-on-crime model with an added twist. The twist is that Obama admits that he and his cadres of law enforcement are incapable of going it alone. So the solution is to "energize the strength of communities, to enhance the understanding of the threat posed by violent extremism."

I've touched on Obama's August formal report to the American people in the past, but after his UN moral equivalency speech and the hackneyed "walk in the other's shoes" admonitions to Israel and the Palestinians, it's probably a good idea to do a little more analysis. Obama's counter-terrorism policy is simply more feel-good, one-nation-under-therapy, liberal utopian silliness. The title of the the report alone is a strong hint of just how unserious he is about domestic terrorism. "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States." If you are empowered, he and his resources can be used for more important things.

"Empowering" is a liberal concept that actually means very little. Essentially, it's giving pretend power to people too timid or too lazy to do things on their own initiative. It makes them feel better about themselves, and is in reality just another facet of the self-esteem movement. If you have to be told that it's a good idea to report "suspicious activity," you're probably too ignorant to get it right.

But the real problem with the report and Obama's entire counter-terrorism policy is that he carries on George Bush's inability or unwillingness to identify the enemy we need to be fighting. "Terror" is a concept, but it can't be an enemy since it exists only in the mind. Wars are fought against real, physical, human enemies. And if you can't identify them, you are taking shots in the dark. But Bush and Obama both refuse to name the enemy for fear of being politically-incorrect and/or wounding the feelings of those actually making war on America, Israel and the entire civilized world.

We are not in the middle of the war on crime, or the war on disease, or the war on poverty, or the war on any other euphemism. We are in the middle of a war--period. Like the Cold War, there are occasional hot outbreaks (such as 9-11), but mostly the enemy is fighting small actions in multiple locations while planning and organizing for the next big strike. Since 9-11, there have been 23,000 terror attacks in the world. So far, America has suffered few but awful attacks since 9-11. The Fort Hood massacre is the most infamous of them.

Multi-culturalism, leftism, one-worldism, moral relativism, blind secularism, and stealth jihadism are the fellow-travelers and enablers of the enemy, but they are not the enemy. Militant Islam is the enemy, and our government refuses to admit that simple fact. To prove that, here is the list of naughty persons in the report that the Obamists want you to look out for: "Neo-Nazis, environmental extremists, anti-tax groups, militias, racial supremacists, and religious zealots." But when it comes to religious zealots, the biggest and most violent of those groups is not identified by name. In fact, isolated radical fundamentalist Christians are treated as if they are as numerous, as determined and as organized as radical fundamentalist Muslims.

Though there are scattered mentions of radicalized Muslims, the report never uses the words Islamism, jihadism, or any other expression which might identify fundamentalist Islam as the most dangerous, most active, and most violent group of all--dwarfing all the others combined. Another interesting thing about the report is that is purports to be a counter-terrorism document, but the words "terror" and "terrorism" do not exist anywhere in the document.

Instead, the harshest description, and the closest to being accurate, is "violent extremism." No mention of the fact that the "violent extremists" who brought down the World Trade Center buildings, the shoe-bomber, the Christmas Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, and the Ford Hood shooter, among many others, all share one violent belief in common--Islamism. Most of the planned attacks were thwarted, usually at the last minute by observant civilians. Each of those civilians was empowered by his or her own inner strength, not by a worthless government report and some feel-good words. The same can be said of those brave passengers who rushed the Islamists aboard Flight 93 and prevented a fourth jumbo jet hit on America on 9-11.

The one "violent extremist" Muslim organization mentioned by name in the report is Al Qaeda. That gave Obama a temporary victory when he took credit for killing the head of that organization. But the report fails to take note of Wahhabi mosques and schools nationwide, of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Hizb ut-Tharir, Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other Islamist group with tentacles spread throughout America. It doesn't even come close to mentioning domestic terrorist-supporting groups posing as peacemakers such as unindicted Holy Land Foundation co-conspirator CAIR.

Quotes from persons intimately involved with terrorism have some telling things to say about the report specifically and Obama's lackadaisical approach to the problem of Islamism generally. Melvin Bledsoe is the distraught father of Carlos Bledsoe, a Muslim convert who murdered a soldier at a military-recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. His comment on the report was that "It's never going to fix the problem when they're dancing around the issues." Islamists are recruiting faster than the military. Ed Husain, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations said that the report said "worryingly little and was primarily designed not to offend Muslims."

Barack Obama, as President and Commander-in-Chief is charged with a major constitutional obligation--to protect the citizens of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. He is not charged with being America's chief investigator of crime. Nor is he charged with being America's chief soother of injured feelings. He is charged with leading America when the nation is at war.

Obama has failed even to identify the enemy, and when he actually takes military action against Muslims of any sort overseas, he does so in what Shepard Smith of Fox News calls "not-wars." Worst of all, the American Commander-in-Chief is ready, willing and able to subvert American sovereignty, cripple American military power, and subordinate American leadership to part-time warriors like NATO and worthless warriors like the United Nations.

Obama can't blame the report on others. It was issued over his signature, and presented to the public as if it were holy writ. I suggest that he change the title to "Whistling Past the Graveyard."