OPINION:
Orlando is the home of Disneyworld, but it’s clear that Mickey Mouse has a second home at Barack Obama’s White House. In the wake of the Sunday attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, with 50 dead and 53 others left wounded, President Obama presented the grim face that Americans have come to expect after such acts of horror.
But he offered no promise of the solution that every American — moderate Muslim, Jew, Christian, whirling dervish or hottentot — yearns to hear. What the president does make clear is that the nation will remain vulnerable to more radical Islamic terror as long as Mr. Obama is the commander in chief. Hillary Clinton, who rushed to the television studios Monday morning to blame guns, not the gunman, for the Orlando massacre, demonstrated that she is his eager clone.
The president responded with his trademark solemn obsequiousness. “Although it’s still early in the investigation,” he said, “we know enough to say this was an act of terrorism and an act of hate.” Well, duh. He went on to chalk up the slaughter to the gun, not the gunman, “a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub.” These were not-so-subtle references to earlier shootings at an elementary school in Connecticut, a church in South Carolina, and a movie theater in Colorado, none of which were carried out by a Muslim. He was eager to spread the idea that massacre in America has nothing to do with radical Islamic violence, it’s just that, well, things happen.
Mr. Obama’s indifference to the source of radical Islamic violence demonstrates to the nation’s enemies that America is no longer willing to fight. “This attack was facilitated by the policies of President Obama and Secretary Clinton,” says Sebastian Gorka, a distinguished professor of military theory at the Marine Corps University.
Hillary on Monday finally abandoned her longstanding refusal to use the term “radical Islam,” in a concession to common sense. The president, however, is sticking by his gun(s). Donald Trump seized the moment early in the day: “Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn’t he should immediately resign in disgrace.”
Mr. Obama’s message has filtered down to all levels of his national security apparatus. The result is an institutional blindness to the evidence of threats. That’s how Maj. Nidal Hasan and the Brothers Tsarnaev showed up on the federal terror radar but were left free to shoot up Fort Hood and blow up the Boston Marathon.
Millions of loyal Muslims in America are done no favor by the reluctance to cite the obvious, that a twisted version of Islam has spread mortal danger among us. Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old American-born Orlando gunman, raised red flags with multiple trips to Saudia Arabia, a source of radical Islamic killers, and he was interviewed at least twice by the FBI. Colleagues where he worked as a security guard reported him for threatening to kill people but his bosses did nothing, for fear of being called “anti-Muslim.”
By Mr. Obama’s perspective, Orlando, like San Bernardino, is merely the price Americans must pay to avoid inflaming the misfits in the Muslim world. Hillary promises more of the same. Orlando demonstrates, if more demonstration were needed, that bowing to bullies is a strategy based on fantasy. Such strategy only whets the appetite for more blood.
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