A
comment made by one of President Obama’s closest aides explains his
blasé attitude toward the lives of Americans. In late 2012, Neera
Tanden, who had been one of President Obama’s closest aides, observed:
Clinton,
being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart
it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls
Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama
wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden.
“The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost
anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.
Barack Obama had been warned
that leaving Iraq without a residual American force could lead to
genocide. When questioned about this risk, he complacently answered that
preventing genocide was not a good enough reason to have troops in Iraq
.
Barack Obama’s coldness towards Americans -- and others, for that matter -- was obvious before 2012.
Barack Obama has long had an Empathy Deficit, as I wrote
in 2010. He easily and coldly boasted he would destroy the coal
industry and kill thousands of jobs with the aplomb of Chairman Mao and
Josef Stalin reengineering their societies. The jobs that were promised
after passage of the trillion-dollar stimulus plan never materialized
because as Barack Obama jocularly put it
two years later “shovel-ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.”
When Texas was hit with devastating forest fires, Obama was cracking jokes
at a California fundraiser, “You’ve got a governor whose state is on
fire denying climate change.” He has articulated his contempt for so
called everyday Americans many times (see my 2012 column, What Obama Thinks of Americans and my 2014 column, Obama Thinks You Are Stupid, That’s Why)
Barack Obama seems particularly complacent when it comes to Americans endangered and murdered by Islamic extremists.
Here are some examples
(with more undoubtedly to come as President Obama oversees a massive
influx of Muslims into America, hence fulfilling his promise to
“fundamentally transform America”). Obama’s Syrian asylum policy
continues apace, despite the role of at least one Syrian “refugee” in
the massacres in Paris. Obama wants to welcome at least 10,000 more
Syrians into America (Hillary wants 65,000). What could go wrong? Ben
Rhodes, Obama’s chief liar now that Susan Rice has outlived her
usefulness in that role, appeared on numerous broadcasts to assure us
these “asylum seekers” will be thoroughly vetted to eliminate security
risks -- contradicting the widely respected FBI chief, James Comey, who
testified before Congress that vetting Syrian “refugees” will be
challenging. Can’t we trust the competency of an administration who can
handle the IRS, the VA, the stimulus program, green energy projects, and
security of government employee records so well?
When
Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered by Islamic
terrorists the best that Barack Obama could offer was that his “loss”
had “captured the imagination of the world.” Captured the imagination? Mark Steyn had some choice words for Obama’s lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl. There was no indignation or rage.
First
of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't
"lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video.
He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp.
And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet
Obama can muster none. (snip)
Well,
says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the
world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's
imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so
fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so,
cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of
therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess
Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that
captured the world's imagination."
After
Barack Obama announced that American journalist James Foley had been
beheaded by Islamic extremists he raced off to the links to yuck it up with NBA star Alanzo Mourning and others.
Obama's golf pals on Wednesday included NBA legend Alonzo Mourning (left)
George
Bush gave up golf as president because he felt it unseemly for a
commander-in-chief to be playing golf while Americans were serving
overseas in the military. Clearly Obama has different seemliness
standards (see his interview with the YouTube comedian GloZell who bathes in milk and cereal in a bathtub).


When
Americans were killed in Benghazi the White House refused to give an
honest accounting of who murdered them (it was an offshoot of Al Qaeda).
Their deaths were, in Obama’s cold phrasing, were not “optimal.” Well, they certainly weren’t optimal for him and his re-election campaign, so he and his Praetorian guard lied about their murders. Who got the blame? An obscure Coptic Christian who
had directed an equally obscure video that may have riled some Muslims
-- had they seen it (which, basically, no one had). The spin was that
Muslims had been (“legitimately”?)
enraged by the video that mocked Mohammed. Survivors were lied to and
are still awaiting a call from the President to honestly explain why
their loved ones had been murdered. They will be waiting a long time.
At
times, he seems intent on justifying Islamic terrorism,or at least
relativizing such violence by putting it in “historical context.” Last
year, at the National Prayer breakfast (of all places) he invoked the Crusades while talking about Islam and terrorism:
At
the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama noted there was a time
when people mass-murdered in the name of Christianity, too:
And
lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other
place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people
committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country,
slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
As
many were quick to point out, the Catholic Church's Crusades began more
than 900 years ago, and the Inquisition began in the 13th century.
The
comparison was absurd but part of a pattern of Obama being an apologist
for Islamic terrorism. The violence perpetrated by Muslim terrorist
never has anything to do with Islam in the rose-colored view of Barack
Obama and his officials and they have all but covered up the role played
by Islam in the murder of Americans.
John Kennedy
wrote of Winston Churchill “he mobilized the English language and sent
it into battle.” Barack Obama has thumbed through the thesaurus and
mobilized the English language in ways that George Orwell had foreseen
-- as a way for regimes to hide the truth from people. In this case,
camouflaging an enemy.
The Muslim Brotherhood becomes a “mostly secular” group-this gem from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Islamic
terrorist attacks become “man-caused disasters.” The 2009 Fort Hood
massacre is described as a case of “workplace violence” despite the
murderer, Nidal Hassan, having business cards describing him as a “soldier of Allah.”
When a Chattanooga Navy recruitment center was attacked by Mohammad
Abdulazeez, a Muslim who justified his attack because he was displeased
by America’s war on terror (and therefore committed terror), the White
House all but ignored the murder of our Navy personnel. Those murders
merited almost zero notice. The White House has focused a lot of
attention on violence on college campuses but was silent in the wake of
the recent stabbing spree by Faisal Mohammed at a California university campus.
One
wonders at what point, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, did American
lives ever matter to Barack Obama? After all, his moral compass,
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., celebrated 9/11 as America’s chickens
having come to roost and routinely spouted anti-American diatribes as
Barack Obama and his family stayed in the pews (Oprah Winfrey and others
quit the church). Israel’s Ambassador to America, Michael Oren, read
both of Obama’s books and what struck him the most was that Barack Obama
never had one good thing to say about America. Not one. Is that what
they teach at private prep and Ivy League schools or was that an
ideology inherited from his parents?
Meanwhile, Barack Obama extolls the role of Islam in America and the world, fabricating
history to do so. He also fabricates in real time, too: erasing the
role as much as he can of Islamic radicalism in violence around the
world. Indeed, “Islamic radicalism” and “Islamic terrorists” are
banished from the lexicon of Obama and all his officials. If one cannot
name an enemy it makes it harder to fight them.
Maybe that is the point.
Compare and contrast the treatment meted out to the Cambridge policemen who were merely doing their job when they merely arrested
Barack Obama’s friend, Henry Louis Gates Jr., for apparent breaking and
entering. From his perch in the White House Obama called the police
“stupid” and indicted police nationwide for racism. One can do the same
exercise regarding Obama’s complacency when Americans are killed by
Muslims to his over the top reaction to the deaths of Trayvon Martin
(“if I had a son he would have looked like Trayvon”) and Michael Brown
-- both cases cleared the people who shot them as having done so in
self-defense, despite the efforts of the federal government to coerce
state governments to find otherwise.
Do some American lives matter more to Barack Obama than others? Given the disparate treatment shown one can speculate so.
Meanwhile, a Texas high-school boy whose feelings were hurt
when a teacher confiscated what appeared to be a bomb but what he
represented as being a clock he had built (and was probably just a disassembled Radio Shack clock)
was acclaimed as a Muslim Rosa Parks and granted a White House visit.
The whole affair now appears to have been a contrived effort by the his
activist father to create a cause celebre and another Muslim martyr
(though not in the most radical sense, though now that the family has moved to Qatar…that clock making may come in handy).
President Obama has an agenda that is becoming increasingly visible. Marc Thiessen recently wrote in the Washington Post of “Obama’s stubborn, willful complacency on terror”:
Somehow, to paraphrase President Obama, it has become routine
— the president dismisses the terrorist threat, only to see terrorists
carry out horrific attacks that give lie to his complacency.
On Sept. 6, 2012, Obama boasted
at the Democratic National Convention that “al-Qaeda is on the path to
defeat.” Five days later, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists attacked two U.S.
diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing the U.S. ambassador and
three other Americans on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
On Jan. 7, 2014, Obama dismissed the Islamic State as the “JV” team in an interview with the New Yorker,
adding that the rise of the Islamic State was not “a direct threat to
us or something that we have to wade into.” That same month, the Islamic
State began its march on Iraq, declaring a caliphate, burning people
alive in cages and beheading Americans.
Then on Thursday, Obama did it again, telling ABC News,
“I don’t think [the Islamic State is] gaining strength” and promising
“we have contained them.” The very next day, the Islamic State launched
the worst attack on Paris since World War II, killing at least 132
people and wounding more than 350 others.
How many times is this sad spectacle going to repeat itself?
Well,
chronologically, for at least one more year. Barack Obama is not
interested in pursuing a war against radical Islam -- he doesn’t think
there is or should be a “war on terror” (another banished phrase) and
seems more intent on burnishing Islam, even if it is at our expense and
at the cost of our lives. Neera Tanden was right; he doesn’t like people
and couldn’t care less what happens to (most) of us: our lives don’t matter.