Islam, history and the failure to recognize a world threat

If you don’t know which side the president is on, you should probably be forgiven. It often appears HE doesn’t know which side he is on.

Last week had to be an all-time low not just for this president, but for any president in history, in terms of looking weak and vacillating, if not downright pusillanimous, in the face of the enemy.

The enemy, in case you need a scorecard, is Islamic expansionist jihad. The tactic is terrorism waged with shameless barbarity, and the goal is worldwide domination in the form of a Sharia-law-based caliphate.

That may seem like a ridiculous and overly ambitious aspiration, and one not worthy of response, but consider this: At the start of World War II, Germany had a population of 79 million compared to a world population of 2.3 billion people. If you want to, go ahead and throw in another 72 million to represent the population of Japan, and another 44 million for Italy. Those three Axis powers, in other words, had a combined population of 195 million to use to seek to impose their will (and their empire) over a world population of 2.3 billion people. That represents approximately a 1 to 12 ratio.

If that 1:12 threat was “credible” — and the deaths of 60 million people during World War II suggest it was — then how much more seriously should we take the threat of Islamic jihad? Muslims, after all, represent nearly one-fourth of the world’s population, and they zealously seek to expand the influence of their religion across the entire globe. This is not something new either. There have been repeated attempts by Muslim armies to conquer Europe in the last 1,300 years.

So what does President Obama say about Islamic jihad?

Nothing. Or worse than nothing. He won’t say the words, and he substitutes for any mention of Islamic terrorism one or another euphemism, most recently “violent extremism,” or he deflects attention from the murderous tactics of the Islamic State by equating it with Jim Crow or the Crusades, as he did last week at the National Prayer Breakfast when he spent more time denouncing Christianity than the existential threat of our times.

Well, yeah, violent extremism is bad wherever and whenever it occurs, but it is not the same thing in all cases. There is certainly terrorism that is not Islamic terrorism, but only Islam uses terrorism in the service of expansionist global domination. There is no comparison between the jihadis and the drug lords in Mexico, who use terror to consolidate their power, nor any similarity to the terrorism of a Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City to send a cryptic message about his fear of the government.

Yes, I guess you could make a legitimate comparison between Islamic terrorism and the brand of communist terrorism practiced by, for instance, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym FARC), but with one key difference — FARC has under 20,000 members and has no chance to enslave mankind as it sweeps across the globe!

President Obama loves to defend Islam, and there’s no doubt that he is right about the fact that most Muslims have no interest in waging war. But by denying the self-evident truth that millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Muslims want to crush Israel, the United States and our European allies, he has turned himself into the Charles Lindbergh of American presidents.

Lindbergh, who like Barack Obama, was an international hero and a role model for millions of children because of his youthful accomplishments, became an ardent apologist for Germany before World War II and toured America in a vainglorious quest to keep us from going to war against the Nazis. Perhaps he even would have succeeded had not Pearl Harbor forced us to join the conflict against the Axis powers.

God knows what world we would be living in today if Lindbergh had prevailed and Hitler had been allowed to vanquish England and Russia and had consolidated his power across a third of the globe! It’s not that Lindbergh was a bad person; he just lacked sufficient imagination to conceive of the immense power to do evil that was wielded by Nazi ideology.

Likewise, President Obama lacks the vision or the intestinal fortitude to comprehend just how dangerous the ideology of Islamic jihad is to the rest of the world. No matter how many good Muslims there are, they are not willing nor able to hold back the angry, vengeful “true believers” willing to die for their cause.

President Obama told the audience at the prayer breakfast that Americans should not get on their “high horse” and act like they are better than the Islamic State militants who behead journalists, crucify children, stone captive women to death, or set ablaze — as they did last week — a Jordanian pilot who was trapped in a cage.

Really??? You think the enemies of the Islamic terrorists are the problem???

If anyone is on a “high horse” of moral smugness and assumed superiority, it is Barack Obama and not those Americans who are willing to tell the truth and ultimately to sacrifice and die to preserve freedom, whether it is in France, England and Germany or Syria, Iraq and Libya.

Those of us who recognize the evil of the Islamic State and are prepared to do anything necessary to stop it do now have a leader, but sadly it is not President Obama. It is King Abdullah II of Jordan, who — when just one of his citizens was killed in that fiery execution — declared eternal war against the jihadis and vowed never to give up.

If President Obama is today’s Lindbergh, then we can only hope that Abdullah will prove to be this generation’s Churchill, who told Britain’s wartime schoolchildren, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

Perhaps good sense is what is missing from our president, or perhaps honor. I wish I knew. But one thing is certain, the tide of history cannot be changed by his empty words.