The Crass Opportunism of Unfettered Greed

"As a president who successfully passed health insurance reform, it's an issue of great importance to him. President Obama will deliver speeches from time to time. Some of these speeches will be paid, some will be unpaid, and regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision and his record."
"I'd just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history -- and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR."
Eric Schultz, Obama senior adviser

Well, that's all right, then, isn't it? Having raised funding out of Wall Street, and then in turn as president of the United States of America, passed legislation that continued to enrich Wall Street at the expense of the have-nots within his society, this former social worker and passionate black activist leftist is entitled to extract munificent sums from corporations more than willing to have the man who was once in the position of the most powerful human on Earth, anoint their enterprise with the blessing of his presence.

Well worth paying for in prestigious ego-stroking.

Of course the former president is not staking out new ground in signing up for those executive-level speech deliveries to those who can afford his luminous presence. A former Grade B actor who also made president took $2-million in payment for two speeches he delivered on request in Japan after he stepped down. At that time he was, of course, in the still-early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

And it is not only Barack Obama who has qualified for speaking rounds of high-dollar intake, but his wife, as well, the estimable former First Lady Michelle Obama, who has just recently announced she will not, after all, make her own run for high political office. "Hi, everybody, it's good to get out of the house", she quipped gracefully, sitting for a politics-free round of questions at the American Institute of Architecture annual conference.

As former First Lady she would, needless to say, have much to say of interest to that professional group.

The very same day that Michelle Obama graced that profession's annual conference with her elegant and svelte presence, her husband addressed a closed-door session to employees of the A&E cable network, alongside historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. There is money to be made, and this power couple means to own as much of the stage and the profits from occupying that world stage, as they can manage.

A speech to a health-care conference scheduled for September, and sponsored by investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, will gain the former president $400,000. Word on how much the couple charges for private speaking engagements is held tightly, not to be divulged to the nosy public. They performed their public duty in leading the free world to the best interests of the United States, and they deserve the fallout of their sacrifice; respect and admiration and cold, hard cash.

"As private citizens [the Obamas] are pretty much free to give speeches in their personal capacity [but at a potential cost to their popularity and future political influence]."
"It’s not a question of whether it’s legal. It’s a question of whether someone in a political environment can make an argument that it was unethical."
Richard Painter, law professor, University of Minnesota, former chief White House ethics lawyer

Former U.S. President Barack Obama © Kamil Krzaczynski / Reuters 

From There To Here : Obama and the Muslim World

"[I am] proud to carry the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: al-salamu alaykum."
"We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars." "Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights."
"So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end."

"I recognize that change cannot happen overnight. No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have all the complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground."
"I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire."
"I know there are many - Muslim and non Muslim - who question whether we can forge this new beginning. Some are eager to stoke the flames of division, and to stand in the way of progress. Some suggest that it isn't worth the effort - that we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash."
"There is so much fear, so much mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward."
U.S. President Barack Obama, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, June 2009

Moving forward, we find ourselves in January of 2017. So, has the promise of a new era dawning come to fruition, validating the Nobel Peace Prize? This son of a Muslim father and a mid-western American mother, who spent his formative years with his mother and a Muslim stepfather in Indonesia where he was exposed to a way of life in Islam first-hand, felt his paternity and his childhood experience would gain him priceless credibility in the Muslim world. The Muslim world was skeptical, and reserved its applause in favour of sitting back and waiting.

Barack Obama was not particularly interested in Islam in the most populous Islamic country on the globe where he grew up before moving to Hawaii, nor in the Islam that lived in India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, though the United States had a more muted interest and presence there. A more visible one by far in Afghanistan where the United States was fully embroiled in a thread that led back to the Middle East through Osama bin Laden's privileged Saudi background and stunning coup in helping to plan the spectacularly successful mass deaths of 9/11.

Under this president, despite his avowed intentions, Guantanamo was not closed emptied of its Islamist detainees and closed down, and withdrawal from Afghanistan did not solve the problem of the Taliban, joined at a later date by Islamic State to jostle the on-the-ground al-Qaeda presence. This president increased drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, doing little to endear himself to fundamentalist Islam practised there. And he orchestrated withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in the conflict that murderously pitted Islam against itself with Sunni and Shiite Iraqis happy to slaughter one another; the constraint of Saddam Hussein previously removed.

And then under President Obama his purpose of "leading from behind" grew apace as the Arab Spring blossomed, then withered. Promising his new era of renewal and removal of the U.S. irritant lodged in Islam's jaundiced eye, the time was ripe for the appearance of a new Islamic threat that would eclipse earlier ones and Islamic State and its vast caliphate established on the back of its terrifying atrocities opened a new era, but not the one Mr. Obama envisioned. The absence of the United States led to side effects and consequences and ISIL was one of them.

Another price was American non-interference in the Syrian civil war to persuade the Islamic Republic of Iran to sign a nuclear deal that would advantage it at a later date in its nuclear weapons aspirations, and the result of that was the deaths of a half million Syrians, while Syria's neighbours in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt took in the hordes of Syrian civilians fleeing their regime's barrel bombs. Iran satisfactorily attained the leverage it longed for in its Shiite crescent as Syria became a client state along with Iraq and Lebanon.

And the vacuum of America's exit invited Moscow and Vladimir Putin to choreograph a rescue of the Syrian regime, hard put to maintain itself despite Iran's proxy Hezbollah militias fighting with Bashar al-Assad under the concerted defiance of the Syrian rebels, abetted by foreign terrorists who from time to time attacked the rebels to establish their own unadulterated Sunni base in Syria. No one in their sane minds could view Europe as a beneficiary of a prospectively invigorating new addition to their resident populations in the process of which thousands of migrants and refugees drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

This, then, is Mr. Obama's Middle East legacy, his triumph in establishing a new relationship between the United States and the Middle East. Where no longer could Muslim states take umbrage at their natural resources holding them prisoner to American energy needs. Dethroned by a man of rude and profane expression who will brook no nonsense and sturdily set about his own agenda, beginning with destroying any last vestige of a legacy other than that of the Middle East, Mr. Obama is now free to make himself even wealthier than he is on leaving office.

It has been estimated in the New York Times that Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle have the earning potential of raking in anywhere from $20 million to $45 million annually between them by engaging in book writing of their experiences to entertain the reading public curious about how history will be portrayed from the Obama perspective, and setting out on the speaking circuit where they can command princely speaking fees to further entertain the public on the details of their presidential exploits. It is said that an ex-president of the United States can readily command $250,000 and more for a single speech.

Yearning To Be Reunited

"Barry? Barry, is this you?"
"Yes ... Who's this?"
"Yes, Barry ... this is your Aunt Jane. In Nairobi. Can you hear me?"
"I'm sorry -- who did you say you were?"
"Aunt Jane. Listen, Barry, your father is dead. He is killed in a car accident. Hello? Can you hear me? I say,  your father is dead. Barry, please call your uncle in Boston and tell him. I can't talk now, okay, Barry. I will try to call you again ..."
At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two  years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told. They all had their favorites, each one seamless, burnished smooth from repeated use. I can still picture Gramps leaning back in his old stuffed chair after dinner, sipping whiskey and cleaning his teeth with the cellophane from his cigarette pack, recounting the time that my father almost threw a man off the Pali Lookout because of a pipe ...
U.S. President Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father

"It has been my long cherished ambition to further my studies in America."
"The people around here [University of Hawaii] have made me feel at home. [They] called upon me to give several speeches on Africa and on Kenya."
"I rarely get any news here about Africa."
Barack Hussein Obama Sr. letters, 1958 - 1964, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem

Barack Obama is seen with his father Barack Obama Sr in an undated family snapshot from the late 60s or early 70s. Obama's father, originally from Kenya, was killed in an car accident in Kenya in 1982 after returning to Africa.   Picture: REUTERS

The letters carry the voice and the thoughts and the experiences of a then-young man from Kenya whose improbable background as a village boy tending goats, walking barefoot to school, but imbued with ambition, intelligence, confidence and audaciousness led him to write to a number of American universities to describe himself as a penniless clerk of 22, able to type 75 words a minute and translate English into Swahili, whose ambition it was to further his education in the United States.

He was looking for some good Samaritan or institute to see their way clear to funding that ambition. And the University of Hawaii took up that challenge, to enable the  young man to travel from his village in Kenya to Hawaii. "I still didn't know the man my father had been", wrote President Obama in his book ... "What had shaped his ambitions?" Having stated which it would seem only logical that if the opportunity presented itself, beyond his long-ago visit to his roots in Kenya, he would grasp it.

Barack Obama's father's letters were discovered in the archives of the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. What a trove that represented. The scholarship funding he was offered enabled him to travel to the United States to fulfill part of his dream of accomplishing something for himself. The letter-discovery was made in 2013. So, of course the university (Hawaii and Harvard) transcripts, the letters written in Obama Sr.'s hand and other related documents were immediately offered for scrutiny to his son.

The void that President Obama has spoken of, written of, at the absence of his father in his life could be partially filled, finally. He is no longer that teenager struggling to understand in the absence of a father "what it meant to be a man". In Dreams from My Father, Mr. Obama's quest to learn as much as he could about his father by visiting his family in Kenya, he discovered vital background and family contacts, but "I still didn't know the man my father had been".

The Schomburg Center is still awaiting a response from the invitation it issued to the President three years earlier. It was at the University of Hawaii while Mr. Obama was busy with his undergraduate studies in 1960 that he met Ann Dunham, from one of his classes. As a Muslim the senior Obama, though he had a wife and two children in Kenya, was able under Islam, to marry another wife, and so he did when it was discovered that Ann Dunham was pregnant. He remained with his American wife until their child was two, then returned to Kenya.

He aspired to be involved in the Kenyan government in its new independence. While at University of Hawaii he adapted readily to campus life. He had revealed that he hadn't achieved a high school diploma in Kenya, but it appears his intelligence and readiness to focus on academics revealed the value of his intelligence, excelling in classes and coming away with an economics undergraduate degree with honors. He went on to Harvard for a graduate degree and by then was no longer anchored to his American family.

Master's degree in economics in hand, he returned to Kenya. President Obama's uncle, the senior Obama's brother, speaks of the resemblance he sees so acutely obvious between his nephew and his brother; the tenor of his voice, the way he moves and strides along, so like his father. Strangely, for a man who so yearns to have known his father, to have been with him, to have had his guidance, President Obama has shown little inclination to make the effort any longer.

If and when he ever does decide to look a little closer at the mementos of the man who was his father he can access them at Box 214 of the Phelps Stokes Fund collection at the Schomburg storage facility in New York. They're there, waiting for him.

Portrait of a President

"We have been very clear to the Assad regime … that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation."
"When you have a professional army that is well armed and sponsored by two large states [—Iran and Russia—] who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict … the notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true."
"It’s important for us to recognize that when over 1,000 people are killed, including hundreds of innocent children, through the use of a weapon that 98 or 99 percent of humanity says should not be used even in war, and there is no action, then we’re sending a signal that that international norm doesn’t mean much. And that is a danger to our national security."
"I’m very proud of this moment [pulling back from the 'red line']. The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make."
U.S. President Barack Obama

"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled."
Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle."
Former U.S. Secretary of State, current Democratic presidential candidate-elect Hillary Clinton

"Credibility and the future interests of the United States of America and our allies [were at stake]. It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

Explaining his August 30, 2013 decision to rethink his formerly firm position on a red line being crossed with the use of forbidden chemical weapons by the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, President Obama stated: "We had UN inspectors on the ground who were completing their work, and we could not risk taking a shot while they were there. A second major factor was the failure of [British Prime Minister] Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament."

Clearly, if Barack Obama placed any credibility in the old adage beloved of one of his principled predecessors, President Harry S. Truman, that 'the buck stops here', he doesn't believe it refers to himself as current President of the United States. Another issue that factored into President Obama's decision not to enforce his warning against the use of chemical agents in Assad's war against his Sunni Syrian population was "our assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it."

In other words, punishment for inflicting an agonizing death on Syrian civilians, including children for protestors' arrogance in believing they could persuade their president to recognize their call for civic equality within Syria, was not to be meted out despite the threat to do so, on reconsideration that to do so might conceivably backlash into embarrassment for the United States. A rather weak argument given the inescapable reality that Mr. Obama's pull-back did indeed leave the U.S. much diminished in the opinion of the global community.

Yet another factor that was revealed by the president in his interview with a journalist interlocutor for The Atlantic was in his opinion of profound philosophical importance: "This falls in the category of something that I had been brooding on for some time. I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless", so he restrained his impulse to act decisively and instead chose to react passively, much to the delight of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose agenda President Obama adopted.

President Obama's ultimate choice which led to a diminishing of the influence and trust of the United States on the world political landscape was immediate and profound. Manuel Valls, France's prime minister spoke of his country's disbelief: "By not intervening early, we have created a monster. We were absolutely certain that the U.S. administration would say yes. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be different today."

The more generalized view of traditional U.S. allies in the Islamic ummah in Africa and the Middle East was that this was an "untrustworthy" man who had spectacularly failed to make good his threats uttered at a time when such a threat, meant to forestall the commission of war crimes by a government against its own population, might have had a positive effect through a response that carried on directly from the threat of action as a consequence of a government atrocity.

Jordan's King Abdullah II stated: "I think I believe in American power more than Obama does", in his disappointment that once again the U.S. under this administration was distancing itself from its traditional allies in the Middle East. Barack Obama spoke to the Muslim world from Cairo University that a new day was dawning in American relations with the Muslim world. And that much was certainly true; unfortunately that new dawning took a totally unexpected tack, one that took Sunni Arabs by complete surprise.

"Iran is the new great power of the Middle East and the U.S. is the 'old'", bitterly stated the Saudi ambassador in Washington. "Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power", President Obama answered his own rhetorical question. "That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply."

"Once the commander in chief draws that red line, then I think the credibility of the commander-in-chief and this nation is a stake if he doesn't enforce it", stated Leon Panetta, CIA director, then secretary of defense in the first Obama term of office. And he was certainly not alone in this opinion. A private statement following directly on her president's reversal, had Hillary Clinton state: "If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice."

There is something about which President Obama cannot be faulted, however, even as he failed in the test as president to remain true to his word. He observes the expectations of major players in the Middle East that it must be the United States that steps in and solves all the regional problems, leaving them off the hook for responsibility to their own region. Turkey, with its huge well-equipped military had the potential to single-handedly -- or with coordination with Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- stop the Syrian dictator whose actions caused Recep Tayyip Erdogan such raging condemnation.

The Arab League between them, comprised of mostly Sunni majority nations have equipped themselves well with the weapons of war, but they have only amassed a combined army on occasions when they meant to assault and destroy Israel. In the face of Shiite Alawite Syria's government's devastatingly wholesale attacks on its Sunni population, having thus far in the five years of civil war butchered an estimated three-quarters of a million people, they would have been justified in stepping in and taking responsibility to stop the slaughter, and prevented half of Syria's population from becoming refugees.

Portrait of a Presidential Mind -- The Atlantic

This, clearly, is a president who stands out from his predecessors. His view of what an American president could and should accomplish is his alone. His legacy will see a much-reduced America in world opinion weighing the effect his administration has had on world affairs. He has questioned traditional alliances, seen enemies in those who were considered 'friends' but never were, and in that way accurately assessed that kind of tradition relating to U.S. foreign policy. He thought to make friends of enemies, and to recognize friends as enemies, as he felt appropriate.

The miserably fractious, militant Islamism exemplified by Pakistan as an example did not appeal to him as a traditional friend and partner, despite the billions in U.S. treasury that supported the Pakistan military which itself in turn supported the Afghan Taliban that attacked American troops in Afghanistan.  And while he has questioned why his country has tied itself to the assurance to Israel that America is committed to ensuring Israel's military edge over its neighbours, he also recognizes that Sunni Arab allies like Saudi Arabia have been hugely responsible for the rise of anti-American terrorism.

He placed his bet on the wrong horse when he negotiated with the Islamic Republic of Iran -- a country which consistently and frequently rebuffed his attempts to mend political-diplomatic relations, prepared to do so even while acknowledging that Iran is a purveyor and supporter of terrorism and a threat to the stability of the Middle East, let alone a growing threat to the world at large through its nuclear ambitions -- for conditions each side could live with to forestall those nuclear ambitions, and lifting economic sanctions that kept Iran in check.

Under his watch as the most powerful man on Earth, as leader of the most prosperous, influential and powerful nation on the globe, world security has diminished. Iran's Khomeinists have restored relations with other rogue states through financial generosity extended to Hezbollah and Hamas, thanks to the outcome of the 'successful' nuclear agreement, leaving Iran to violate UN resolutions through test-firing ballistic missiles where Iran's intention to destroy Israel are writ large.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has grown tentacles all over the world of Islam as disaffected Muslims on a psychological rampage against the West cling to the martyrdom cult of traditional Islamic jihad to set out on a wide path of blood-soaked atrocities. James Clapper, Director of U.S. National Intelligence stated that the number of countries facing a "significant risk of instability" has grown by 59 additions.

And Devin Nunes, chair of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee has stated that the United States of America now faces "the highest threat level since the 9/11 attacks". Some legacy, that, even if world events have conspired to engulf the U.S. in a quagmire of complex and disabling situations inimical to its own stability, leading to a disaffected population prepared to entertain the possibility of electing a celebrity-mountebank.

The Death-Fomenting Ideology That Cannot be Named

"I read the intelligence faithfully ISIS is not contained ISIS is expanding."
Dianne Feinstein, Senate Intelligence Committee

"More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military's Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIL and al-Qaeda's branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials."
The Daily Beast

"[From Guantanamo, 120 detainees were released by the Obama administration who] served international terror networks at every level, from suicide bombers to senior strategists and leaders [the 2009 Fort Hood massacre despite Army major Nidal Hasan shouting 'Allahu Akbar' was construed as] workplace violence [even while the FBI found terror network links.]"
Stephen F. Hayes (investigative journalist) and Thomas Joscelyn (senior fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies)

"Well, here's what I want you to know: The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us. Our success won't depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values, or giving into fear. That's what groups like ISIL are hoping for. Instead, we will prevail by being strong and smart, resilient and relentless, and by drawing upon every aspect of American power."

"Here's how. First, our military will continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in any country where it is necessary. In Iraq and Syria, airstrikes are taking out ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil tankers, infrastructure. And since the attacks in Paris, our closest allies -- including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom -- have ramped up their contributions to our military campaign, which will help us accelerate our effort to destroy ISIL."

U.S. President Barack Obama

Olivier Douliery / Pool / Getty Images President Obama talks about the U.S.-led war on ISIS at the Defense Department

America has abdicated its power brokerage role in world affairs. The American electorate chose a man with many attributes and in the process of installing him in the White House as a new kind of representative of the executive powers of the presidency of the United States, courageously elected a black man to become the most powerful human figure on the planet. The message was clear, the electorate recognized that a biracial black man was fully capable of doing anything a white man with similar intellectual and elite management attributes could perform.

The message was a good one, and so enthused the world at large that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded a man who made it clear that he was interested primarily in championing peace, not war. He would do things differently than his predecessors, particularly his immediate predecessor; pursue the path of amity between nations while shunning the prevailing order of power and command. And so, he famously held out his hand of goodwill to those nations suspicious of America's agenda based on previous experience and their deservedly jaundiced view of the future.

U.S. President Barack Obama soon found that despite his intentions the world would not blandly put down either its national xenophobic, tribal, clan, religious suspicions, nor abandon its armies in favour of re-establishing an order he envisioned of clarifying the human race as one big accommodating population capable of setting aside misunderstandings for the greater purpose of making the world a better place to live for everyone. His assurances that the Western democracies had no intention of defaming Islam fell on deaf ears.

But he has never abandoned his will to defend Islam from the non-Muslim world's impression that the religion spews contempt and hatred for all those around the world who have continued to resist the conquest-command of 'surrender' to Islam, emphasizing that the religion to which he was exposed as a young boy in Malaysia during his mother's second marriage, and in which his African family in Kenya was fully engrained represented an admirable ideology; how could he view Islam otherwise than as a religion of peace?

"They [al-Qaeda] probably had grown by about -- I'd say close to doubling by that time [when in 2012 President Obama claimed that on his watch the U.S. had] decimated [it]. And we knew that. The intelligence was very clear [but it] did not meet the narrative [that Obama wanted]."
Michael T. Flynn, (former Defense Intelligence Agency) director

When Osama Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was raided and he was summarily dispatched to the bottom of the ocean, valuable documents were taken into custody by the Navy Seals, representing "the largest cache of intelligence" yet taken in a raid according to Tom Donilon formerly national security adviser. Despite the intentions of the Defense Intelligence Agency those intelligence documents have not yet been explored.

Rising "Islamophobia"

"[The Obama Administration is] living in a fantasyland, a bubble, where they have a pre-concocted narrative that terrorism is the result of economic hardship, political disenfranchisement… global warming, climate change is much more dangerous… the real jayvee team is ISIS, al-Qaeda is on the ropes… This is the narrative that they’ve spun themselves into for seven years, and anything that counters that, any shock of reality that goes against the White House meme, has to be ignored. So let’s talk about gun control. It’s incredible."
"Let’s not talk about jihad, let’s not talk about why these people do it.  Let’s talk about gun control.  It’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit in my opinion."
"The war is real.  The war is here. 30 percent of the 82 people we’ve killed or arrested in America in the last two years [for ISIS involvement] didn’t want to go abroad to be jihadis. They wanted to kill Americans in America.  This is a war that is real and global.  Jihad has arrived at the shores of America.  9/11 isn’t history – it is now."
"We need leadership that says one thing very clearly: we have an enemy – not global climate change, the enemy is global jihad, and these people are evil."
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Breitbart National Security contributor, Chair of Military Theory, Marine Corps University

"I know that after so much war, many Americans are asking whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure. The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it."
"This was an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people. What we can do and must do, is make it harder for them to kill [by tightening gun laws]."
"[The spread of radical Islam within the U.S. is] a real problem that Muslims must confront without excuse."
President Barack Obama

Anas Altikriti (senior member of Muslim Brotherhood) standing next to Iraqi Parliament Speaker Usama al-Nujaifi shaking hands with President Obama / Flickr

Well, then! The President's caution to the American people not to hold their fellow Muslim citizens responsible for the evil done by jihadis gave comfort to some. The Muslim Brotherhood has entree to the Oval Office; they have President Obama's ear and he listens carefully as though what they have to tell him will reflect the fact that they are 'moderate' Islam personified, whereas in reality their incubation foretold those of all their successors. When the president urges Muslims to do something about the pretenders-to-Islam hijacking their religion in the creation of pious carnage, perhaps he should look to whether the Brotherhood has his ear.

The President's initiative in the wake of the latest Islamist atrocity in his country is to urge Congress to pass authorization to approve legislation so that those on the "no-fly list"; pinpointed specifically because there are concerns over their allegiance and their possible Islamist interests and contacts -- would be prevented from obtaining firearms. That is, obtaining them through a legal process. Jihadists are nothing if not determined, and in the black market that thrives anywhere and most particularly in America, procuring weapons would be no problem.

He did emphasize that the nation's law enforcement and intelligence communities are unable always without fail to identify threats and neutralize them before they become yet another jihadist atrocity. Which was why, he emphasized, gun laws must be tightened, as a matter of consolidating national security. Gun laws should indeed be tightened but not in response necessarily to the attacks by Islamist jihadists. To link Islamist jihad and domestic gun laws entirely misses the point.

And the point is the infiltration into America of the poisonous elixir of Muslim triumphalism as expressed through successful jihadist attacks. Even those that are apprehended can be regarded as successes, since they have elicited the terror reaction they were meant to produce, putting the country and its citizens on high alert, and causing new and possibly useless defensive props to be installed, costly to the nation and with but a thin veneer of security.

When warning a society that government agencies are pressed to the limit, doing all they can to thwart such attacks, and succeeding mostly, but failing on occasion, that society has been placed on alert that their government is not quite capable of protecting them adequately. When warning people that as citizens they must be alert to anything unusual that can be reported to authorities to avert calamity, a general atmosphere of low-grade panic is not far from the surface.

In alerting people in general that the Muslim community is entitled to the same considerations as any other Americans, people are being informed that government is there for the protection of all, which is all to the good, but it is well to remember that it is within the mosques and the Islamic social services institutions that American values and virtues are being undermined. Among the vast numbers of innocent Muslims do indeed lurk maleficent usurpers of public order.

Islamist terrorist groups are well represented throughout the West and their presence is well enough known to the broader Muslim community, from among many of which there is sympathy for their Islamist agenda. Islamists cleverly know how to twist situations to reflect the helplessness of Muslims when they and more likely their religion are held responsible for the violence of jihadists. They are turned into victims. And their accusers are Islamophobes. 

"Hate-filled rhetoric and anti-Muslim attacks are putting the lives of American Muslims and their families in real danger."
"We are particularly concerned by an emerging pattern of government officials and employees, as well as other public figures, seeming to endorse or encourage violence against Muslims."
Nihad Awad, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

Remember, terrorism has become an Islamist tool of first choice. It is a choice made by Islamists as a weapon against the West. Their intention is to prevail in jihad which their religion instructs the devout to engage with. To enable Islam to be empowered through the surrender claimed by Islam as its right in the larger purpose of achieving global domination. Achieved in time through the steady infiltration of Islam throughout the lands of non-Muslims for the patient.

For those prepared to accelerate the process, it is Islamist jihad wielding the venomous violence of terrorism that becomes the choice where two things can be accomplished; venerated martyrdom in the process of diminishing the number of non-believers from a life they do not deserve.