It took seven years for President Barack Obama to utter the words, but in a 13-minute address to the nation on Sunday night he at last acknowledged that the seventh and latest major attack in America during his administration “was an act of terrorism.”
The slaughter days ago of 14 Americans in San Bernardino, Calif., Obama said, had been carried out by two people who “had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West.”
“Our nation has been at war with terrorists since Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” he continued.
“The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL [the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a broader description of ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] and any other organization that tries to harm us.
"Our success won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values, or giving in to fear.”
After years of avoiding the word “terrorism” or any link between such acts and Islamism, a political ideology, the President’s statements at least imply a change of mind.
Has Obama seen the light — or merely felt the heat of Democrats facing the 2016 election tied to a president who has seemed weak and indecisive?
As columnist Charles Krauthammer observed, President Obama at last showed up on these issues on Sunday night, and showing up is 80 percent of being president.
But the president on Pearl Harbor Day eve offered no new policy against ISIL/ISIS in his speech. His battle plan in this newly acknowledged war against terrorism sounded more like an attack on Americans than on radical Islamist terrorists.
Imagine that in 1940 we had tuned in to hear British Prime Minister Winston Churchill encourage those facing Nazi Germany’s bombing of London and 15 other British cities.
What if Churchill had announced that in the face of Nazi aggression and potential invasion, his government’s response would be to disarm law-abiding British people?
What if this wartime leader had said we must not speak ill of, nor monitor, Germans lest this radicalize them into Nazis?
Bizarrely, these are the only new policies commander-in-chief Obama offered, after seven years of denial, to win this war with radical Islamism.
Missing from Obama’s Oval Office speech was the bust of Winston Churchill he returned to the United Kingdom as one of his first presidential acts in 2009.
Britain gave the bust to the White House as a reminder that this great wartime leader descended not only from heroic Dukes of Marlborough but also from an American mother, Jennie Jerome, making him a hybrid of our two peoples.
Both Churchill’s image and courageous spirit were missing from President Obama’s speech. Instead, we heard some very odd statements.
President Obama, for example, denounced the “dark path of radicalization” that we should not fight by “abandoning our values” or by anti-Muslim “divisiveness,” i.e., free speech threatened by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
But President Obama was himself a radical community organizer who has relentlessly used Saul Alinsky tactics of polarization and divide-and-conquer to demonize opponents, pit Americans against one another, and circumvent the constitution.
His own radicalism led him to associate with ACORN radicals, Marxist professors, and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.
His own background is so extreme that were he not president, he might have a difficult time obtaining a security clearance from the United States government.
On Sunday, President Obama said we must not abandon our values, but those values include our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Mr. Obama would now deny this to anyone whose name appears on the notoriously-inaccurate “no fly” list — violating another of our values, that we are innocent until proven guilty.
Obama could arbitrarily put your name on the “no fly” list, and the burden of proof would be on you to prove you do not belong there.
Warrior President Obama seems eager to extend the benefit of every doubt and protection to Muslims in, or seeking to enter, America — but to repeal key constitutional rights to the rest of us.
Lowell Ponte is co-author, with Craig R. Smith, of "The Great Withdrawal"; "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"; "The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back"; "The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us . . . And Seven Ways to Stop It"; and "Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America's Optimistic Golden Age." Read more reports from Lowell Ponte — Click Here Now.
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