OPINION:
Reality is rarely kind to the purveyors of fantasies. Barack Obama and his administration have tried for eight years to persuade everyone that Islamic terror is merely a figment of the imaginations of bigots, racists and other bad people. But he can’t seem to get the memo to the radical Islamic terrorists, who keep trying to blow up Jews, Christians and other infidels, and often succeed.
The president thinks America is the source of mischief (and worse) in the world. He had hardly found his way to the bathroom in the White House eight years ago before he hurried off to the Middle East to apologize to the Muslims for all the bad things America has done to them, and blaming America first is a habit he has not tried to break. He was at it again this month in Asia, cataloging American sins and misdemeanors.
But the president just can’t get any help from reality. No sooner than he makes a ritual denial of the reality of radical Islamic assaults on civilized men and women, reality strikes again, as with the explosions of homemade bombs in New York and New Jersey over the weekend.
When he finally brought himself to speak to the latest outrages, he couldn’t bring himself to say that the incidents were terrorism. He was saddened by it, of course, as we all are, but for all he knew the bombs might have been the work of blue-haired Lutheran ladies from Minnesota, who arrived in New York City and were driven to take out their pique on Gotham for being unable to get tickets to “Hamilton.”
“We’ve seen what was apparently a pipe bomb go off in New Jersey,” he said, “where it could have seriously injured our U.S. Marines and spectators who were there for a race. The bombing in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York injured more than two dozen people.”
He refrained from making the logical connection between the work of the suspected bomber, Ahmad Khan Rahami, and the Islamic State (sometimes called ISIS), which has urged individual radical Muslims in the United States to take the war to “infidels” wherever they find them. He rightly praised the good work of the New York police and the FBI for making quick work of the arrest of the suspected perp, and he used the occasion to repeat his assertion that he is winning the war against ISIS. “We will continue to lead the global coalition in the fight against [ISIS], which is instigating a lot of people over the internet to carry out attacks, we are continuing to go after them, we’re going to take out their leaders, we’re going to take out their infrastructure. They are continuing to lose ground in Iraq and Syria.”
That sounds good. It would sound even better if it were so.
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