Post-American Presidency (30 page)

But in Cairo, Obama told the world that he intended to remove those safeguards. The only beneficiaries, in the long run, would be the
Islamic jihad terrorists who would once again be able to receive support from their well-heeled American coreligionists.

It was all part of a larger pattern.

RUSH TO JUDGMENT

When news broke about the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, in which thirteen people were killed and thirty-nine wounded, Barack Obama advised the nation not to rush to judgment. “We don’t know all the answers yet,” the president said. “And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.” Obama delivered this statement from the Rose Garden—while, incidentally, George W. Bush was visiting wounded victims in Fort Hood.

Over the next few days, it became clear, despite the mainstream media’s obfuscations and denials, that the shootings were a terrorist attack by an Islamic jihadist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Yet Obama never acknowledged this, and the Department of Homeland Security refused to classify the shootings as a terrorist attack. Obama would apparently have preferred that the American people forget that Hasan screamed “Allahu akbar” before he mowed down scores of patriotic Americans, and that he gave away Qur’ans with his business card before his act of jihad. Hasan also gave his landlord two weeks’ notice—showing that he had planned this for a long time. He didn’t just snap.

Obama seemed to want Americans to ignore the fact that Hasan went to a mosque where a jihadist imam preached hatred of America. The same imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, was “spiritual adviser” for three of the hijackers who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and praised Hasan’s mass murders as a sterling example of Islamic jihad. Obama apparently preferred that Americans didn’t know that, when Hasan was asked his nationality, he didn’t identify himself as an American, but as a Palestinian.

Obama didn’t want Americans to rush to judgment about how Hasan spoke approvingly of the shooting death by an Islamic jihad terrorist of a Little Rock Army recruiter in June. Obama didn’t want anyone to draw any conclusions from how Hasan reportedly was heard saying, “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square.”

Obama didn’t want Americans to rush to judgment.

The post-American president was not so circumspect when he spoke out about professor Henry Louis Gates’s arrest by Cambridge, Massachusetts, police sergeant James Crowley. Obama incited hatred on national television, rushing to judgment against a white cop who was just doing his job. Obama tried to incite racial division and wrongly criticized the police during a news conference: “But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, No. 3… that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

The incident, Obama said, showed “how race remains a factor in this society.”

A few days later, after an avalanche of criticism, Obama backtracked, saying: “In my choice of words, I unfortunately, I think, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Crowley specifically.”

But he did not apologize for
his
rush to judgment. Apparently jumping to conclusions was wrong only when it led to the conclusion that there had been another Islamic terror attack on American soil.

But to come to that conclusion really didn’t involve any “rush to judgment” at all. What became known about Hasan made that abundantly clear. He wrote “Allah” on his door, according to a neighbor, in Arabic. During his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service
University of the Health Sciences, he was reprimanded for preaching Islam to his patients and other doctors. He drew attention from law enforcement officials with Internet postings under his name that praised suicide bombing, saying that their intention was to “save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers,” and that “if one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.” He turned a grand round session in which he was supposed to be teaching about a topic in psychiatry into a session of Islamic proselytizing, complete with an unusually forthright avowal of the Islamic teachings mandating warfare against unbelievers.

His attack at Fort Hood was not the act of a crazy person. This was not the random act of a nutcase. According to Maj. Gen. Robert Scales at Fort Hood, Hasan committed murder, execution-style, at close range. He shot 44 to 50 rounds, which is a great deal of ammunition to use in a short period. He said that the murders were clearly premeditated.
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By not rushing to judgment, Obama could sweep the issue under the carpet.

MAKING AMERICANS LESS SAFE

Meanwhile, Barack Hussein Obama was making Americans less safe than we were before he was president.

In August 2009 his administration made it official, banning government spokesmen and analysts from using the terms “war on terrorism,” “jihadists,” and “global war.”
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The war on terror was over, and as far as official Washington was concerned, the jihad never was on in the first place.

The only people who didn’t get the memo were the Islamic jihadists themselves. Or maybe they did get it, and they understood it all
too clearly: they realized that the Obama administration was weak and anxious to accommodate the Islamic world, and surmised that it would do little or nothing to resist Islamic jihad activity in the United States. Like Osama bin Laden observing Bill Clinton’s withdrawal of American troops from Somalia in the 1990s after the Black Hawk incident, they sensed that the Americans were a weak horse, and that it was time for their strong opponents to step up operations.

And step them up they did. In a three-month period in the late summer and early fall of 2009, there was an extraordinary proliferation of jihad attacks, attempted attacks, and exposed plots in the United States or involving American nationals abroad. In December 2009, a Pakistani Muslim living in Chicago, David Headley (whose original name was Daood Gilani, but who changed it so as to avoid suspicion in the United States), was arrested and charged with aiding in the planning of the jihad massacre in Mumbai in November 2008. Headley visited all the sites of the massacre beforehand, reporting back to his fellow jihadists about logistics of the attack.
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The same week five American citizens were arrested in Pakistan for their involvement with violent jihadist groups.
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Also that same week, a Muslim graduate student from Saudi Arabia stabbed to death a seventy-seven-year-old professor, Richard Antoun. One of the student’s roommates had gone to authorities to report him: “I said he was acting oddly, like a terrorist. When I informed them, it was for them to understand that the guy was violent or he may be violent.”
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But as in the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, warnings went unheeded. Perhaps officials in Barack Obama’s America were more afraid of being charged with “bigotry” and “Islamophobia” and so quietly sat on the roommate’s warning, hoping that it wouldn’t blow up in their faces.

But it did.

In August 2009, seven Muslims in North Carolina were charged
with aiding terrorists; a month later, it came to light that they had planned a jihad attack against the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.
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In September, a New York–based Muslim, Najibullah Zazi, was arrested as he plotted to set off a weapon of mass destruction in a sporting event or some other crowded area.
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Another Islamic jihadist, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, was arrested after placing an inert car bomb at a sixty-story office tower in downtown Dallas.
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Yet another jihadist, an American convert calling himself Talib Islam, was arrested for plotting to blow up the Paul Findley Federal Building in Springfield, Illinois.
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In October, Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a Detroit imam who taught his followers that they should wage jihad warfare against the United States, was killed in a shootout with the FBI.
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Also in October, a Muslim in Boston, Tarek Mehanna, was arrested for plotting to massacre American civilians in a shopping mall, as well as to murder “members of the executive branch” whom law enforcement officials declined to identify.
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The reason there was no major Islamic jihad attack in America after 9/11 was because of President George W. Bush, his team, and his policies. Now Obama is dismantling those very same policies, emasculating the CIA, trying to close Gitmo, and creating walls between agencies—restoring many of the same terrible policies of Bill Clinton that made 9/11 possible.

Obama seemed all too willing to abet the imposition of a soft Sharia in America. Refusing to call Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood what it really was, a jihad attack, was to accept the laws of dhimmitude, which forbid the dhimmis from speaking ill of Islam, Allah, or Muhammad. And so, an avowed Islamic jihadist shot over fifty people at Fort Hood, and Obama seemed intent most of all on making sure that no one got the idea that the shootings had anything to do with Islam. This was Sharia. This was dhimmitude.

The crowning capitulation came in February 2010, when the
Obama Defense Department released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a report on security threats to the United States that it is required to issue every four years. In 128 pages, Obama’s QDR doesn’t mention the threat of Islamic jihad at all—not even with the popular weasel words such as “radical,” “Islamist,” or “extremist.” However, the report devotes eight pages to an exhaustive discussion of the security threat posed by… climate change.
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How long do you think you will remain safe while Obama ignores the jihad threat, and meanwhile triples the number of “diversity” visas and “religious” visas from the fiercest jihad hotspots in the world: Somalia, Gaza, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and more?
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One thing is certain: Obama’s appeasement of the Islamic jihad both internationally and inside America will bear fruit. Bitter fruit.

IN DUE COURSE, THE POST-AMERICAN
PRESIDENT TURNED AGAINST HIS OWN PEOPLE
(ALTHOUGH IT SEEMS INCREASINGLY UNLIKELY THAT HE
ever really considered them his people): those who had dedicated their lives to protecting this nation after the September 11 terror attacks. He announced his intention to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention camp during his presidential campaign and reiterated this goal many times after becoming president, despite the embarrassing fact that many former Gitmo detainees returned to jihad after being released from the camp.

Obama accepted at face value the leftist claim that Guantánamo was a torture camp. Even as late as his December 1, 2009, speech
announcing his troop escalation in Afghanistan, he reiterated this: “And finally, we must draw on the strength of our values—for the challenges that we face may have changed, but the things that we believe in must not. That’s why we must promote our values by living them at home—which is why I have prohibited torture and will close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the source, the moral source, of America’s authority.”
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But Obama’s pledge to speak out on behalf of human rights everywhere rang hollow almost immediately. It was bitterly ironic that just over a week later, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies found in a survey of twelve Arab countries—Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—that the human-rights situation in virtually all of them had deteriorated markedly in the preceding year. “Arab governments remained wedded to a broad array of repressive laws that undermine basic liberties,” said the report—and it accused the Obama administration of abetting the repression. American policies toward these nations, it said, were “wholly inimical to reform and human rights in the region.” Obama had abandoned reform initiatives: “The last spark of life in the initiatives was quashed once and for all with the arrival of a new US administration.”
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Why was Obama mum about the deteriorating human-rights situation in these Muslim countries? Did he harbor hopes that he would be able to induce them to change by heaping praise and concessions upon them? Or was he simply indifferent to the human-rights situation in those nations, for while the alleged torture at Gitmo served his political purposes in numerous ways, human-rights abuses in Syria or
Yemen could not either do him damage or afford any significant political gain?

Obama tried to maximize public outrage over the “torture” at Guantánamo. In April 2009, the Obama administration announced that it intended to release a series of photos that supposedly depicted this torture.
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This would, of course, have handed America’s enemies a huge propaganda opportunity and eroded the nation’s moral authority to act in the world perhaps for generations. But the ensuing public outcry was so great that ultimately the post-American president, choosing his battles, quietly let the issue drop.
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Nevertheless, the damage had been done: the president of the United States was spreading the notion that American officials had engaged in torture at Guantánamo Bay. Even without actually releasing the photos, he had provided ample grist for Islamic jihadist propaganda mills.

Why did Obama indulge moral outrage over the alleged torture at Gitmo, while ignoring much worse actual torture that was going on in countries he was approaching with outstretched hand?