Jim Geraghty muses at National Review Online about President Obama’s long-running dismissive attitude toward ISIS.
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” — President Obama on ISIS, January 2014
By now, it seems clear that President Obama’s infamous description of ISIS to The New Yorker’s David Remnick is the most spectacularly wrong statement he’s uttered in the last eight years.
ISIS-inspired Islamists have launched four terror attacks on American soil in the past 13 months: the Garland, Texas attack on a “draw Mohammed” contest, the Chattanooga shooting that killed four Marines and a Navy sailor, the San Bernardino attack that killed 14 people and injured 22 more, and now Orlando, where one gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 others.
The frequency of these attacks is increasing late on Obama’s watch, but they are not a new phenomenon. There were intermittent “lone-wolf” terror attacks during the Bush years. On July 4, 2002, a 41-year-old Egyptian national killed two Israelis and wounded four others at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport. In 2006, UNC-Chapel Hill student Mohammed Taheri-azar drove an SUV into a group of pedestrians “to avenge the killings of Muslims by the U.S. across the world.” That same year, Pakistani-American Naveed Haq killed one woman and wounded five others at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. …
… Obama has made a habit of declaring that ISIS is “not an existential threat to us,” setting the bar at a level that only the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan have ever met. After the Brussels terror attack, on a trip to Argentina, Obama declared, “I addressed this issue a little bit at the baseball game when I was interviewed by ESPN, but let me reiterate it: Groups like [ISIS] can’t destroy us. They can’t produce anything.”
This isn’t correct. Right now ISIS is producing American-born mass killers.
