As the World Burns

Islamist terrorism is metastasizing. Russia has become increasingly powerful and menacing.

In response to these threats, the President of the United States has declared war on climate change. Having ensured that Iran will have nuclear weapons and having succeeded in funding Iran-based terrorism to the tune of $150 billion, Barack Obama is taking a victory lap in the wilds of Alaska.

Closer to home, American college students are being indoctrinated in political correctness, are obsessing about gender neutral pronouns and are having a great national conversation about Caitlyn Jenner's genitalia.

No matter how you spell it, it sounds like surrender.

Caroline Glick remarked in a Facebook post:

Within 5-10 years, Pakistan will have the third largest nuclear arsenal. Thanks to Obama, Iran will have nuclear weapons and ICBMs.
Egypt will continue to teeter on the brink.

And while US academia obsesses over gender neutral pronouns, Islamic State and its jihadist brethren are captivating the imagination of millions of Muslims in the Middle East and throughout the world.

What could go wrong?

You cannot fight the war on Islamist terrorism without recognizing that you are fighting a war against Islamist terrorism. As Glick points in her column, out the idea of “jihad” must count as one of the most powerfully captivating ideas in the world today:

And the idea of jihad that the Obama administration will not discuss is perhaps the most powerful idea in the world’s marketplace of ideas today.

Perhaps we are so inured to the Obama administration’s dereliction, that we ignore what is happening. Glick explains:

We have arrived at the point where the consequences of the West’s intellectual disarmament at the hands of political correctness begins to have disastrous consequences in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Speaking last month at the memorial service for the five US marines massacred at a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, “The meaning of their killing is yet unclear, and what combination of disturbed mind, violent extremism, and hateful ideology was at work, we don’t know.” US Vice President Joe Biden claimed, the “perverse ideologues...may be able to inspire a single lone wolf, but they can never, never threaten who we are.” Both men were wrong, and dangerously so. The meaning of the killings was no mystery. Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot his victims down in cold blood because he was a jihadist. He wrote of his devotion to the Islamic war for global domination on his blog. He downloaded messages from Anwar Awlaki, the American al-Qaida commander killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011.

On other fronts, the administration has decided that it’s all about the messaging. If you do not call it evil, it is not evil. If you do not call it Islamist, it is not Islamist. In order to win the war all you need to do is to say we are winning, to put out reports and press releases saying that we are winning, and skew all intelligence reports toward the victory narrative:

Last week the Pentagon’s Inspector General announced it is investigating reports that the Obama administration has required US intelligence agencies to minimize their reporting on the threat IS poses. Intelligence officers have allegedly been ordered to exaggerate the success of the US’s anemic campaign against its bases in Iraq and Syria while understating the threat IS constitutes.

Over the past year, jihadists published the home addresses of American soldiers and officers. On numerous occasions, what an FBI alert referred to as “Middle Eastern men” accosted the wives of US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan outside of their homes.

Speaking to concerned soldiers last week, Carter again pretended away the problem. While insisting that protecting soldiers is “job one for all of us,” Carter insisted that the threat was limited to “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”

Australian Foreign Minister Julia Bishop warned in June that IS may already have sufficient nuclear material to produce a dirty bomb. As we have seen with IS’s wide-scale use of chemical weapons in Iraq, we must assume that its fighters will use all weapons at their disposal.

Had the West – led by the US – been willing to abandon the intellectual straitjacket of political correctness with which it has willingly shackled itself, IS may very well have been a marginal movement able to attract no more than “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”

In the indoctrination mills that America calls universities, any discussion of these topics will be greeted with outrage. Those who dare bring them up will be charged with Islamophobia.

And yet, the universities are too easy a target. The fault lies with President Obama and his administration’s failure to fight the war against Islamist ideas. If you cannot name it you cannot fight against. If you do not fight against it, you are telling the world that it is acceptable.

We can only hope that Republican presidential candidates will address this issue and will hope Obama to account for what his policies have wrought. It would be better than spending their time forming a circular firing squad and trying to destroy each other. And let's hear about some proposals that are more consequential than capturing an oil field or two.