How Obama Facilitated More Islamic Terror

Most Americans are well aware of the Islamic terrorist attack in Brussels last week that left 35 dead. That awareness level probably declines, however, regarding the Easter Sunday attack in Pakistan. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, slaughtered 72 people, mostly children, and reminded the world their “target was Christians.” Despite these atrocities, progressives here and in the EU invariably assure us the threat of terrorism is overblown. Such despicable nonsense cannot withstand a terribly inconvenient reality: There are far more Islamic attacks occurring than being reported by the media.

“This list of terrorist attacks committed by Muslims since 9/11/01 … is incomplete because not all such attacks are picked up by international news sources, even those resulting in multiple loss of life,” explains a website dedicated to chronicling violence committed by the Religion of Peace™. “These are not incidents of ordinary crime involving nominal Muslims killing for money or vendetta. We only include incidents of deadly violence that are reasonably determined to have been committed out of religious duty — as interpreted by the perpetrator.”

What has been picked up is nothing short of astounding. In the last 30 days alone, there have been 136 terrorist attacks in 25 different countries. Those attacks have killed 1,122 people and injured another 3,111. And the website is quick to remind us that undercounting remains an ongoing problem, citing November 2014 as a month where they accounted for 284 attacks and 2,515 deaths, even as a BBC analysis of the same time period tallied 664 attacks and 5,042 deaths in 14 different countries.

For perspective, BBC notes those totals came to “a daily average of 168 deaths, or seven every hour.”

The website addresses those who might be skeptical regarding such totals, explaining that the incidents they tally “are collected each day from public news sources. There is no rumor or word-of-mouth involved. Although every attempt is made to be accurate and consistent, we are notmaking the claim that this is a scientific product.”

And while thereligionofpeace.com authors are quick to point out they are making no attempt to “convince anyone that they are in mortal danger or that Muslims are innately dangerous people,” they do assert that Islam is “different.” “No other religion inspires the sort of terrorism that the ‘Religion of Peace’ produces,” the site states. “It should be acceptable to question and critique the teachings, particularly those that are supremacist in nature.”

Yet for many progressives and their media enablers, questioning or criticizing Islam results in reflexive accusations of Islamophobia. Leading the charge are organizations like the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) despite its continuing status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror-finance trial against the Holy Land Foundation and several officials of that organization found guilty of funding the terrorist group Hamas.

CAIR is joined by Obama, who can’t put the words “terrorism” and “Islamic” in the same sentence, yet assures us that the Islamic State is “not an existential threat” to the United States. This despite FBI director James Comey’s revelation last October that there are at least 900 investigations of suspected ISIL operatives, recruits and individuals currently occurring, putting his agency under a strain. “If that becomes the new normal,” Comey said, “that would be hard to keep up.”

Do American leftists want to keep up? If so, how does one square that with their insatiable appetite for open borders that has now metastasized to the point where the Obama administration has told U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents not only to release illegal aliens, but no longer order them to appear at deportation hearings? How does it square with Homeland Security Department head Jeh Johnson declaring that the illegals already here are “in effect” citizens, when he has no idea who these people actually are? How does our feckless president continue to champion the increased emigration of Muslim refugees, and the same empty promise to “decimate” ISIL he made two years ago, even as the carnage in Paris and Brussels alone reveal the utter emptiness of such assertions?

“After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests,” writes historian Victor Davis Hanson. “But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations.”

Neither is a United States that doesn’t enforce national sovereignty, and embraces hundreds of sanctuary cities in clear violation of federal law.

Hanson issues a clear warning regarding America’s future: “Europe’s perfect storm is upon us. A shrinking, statist, and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or religious, is now in a war with near neighbors of a very different sort. In the Middle East, the fundamentalists are growing in numbers, and they most certainly do believe that their own lives are nothing in comparison to the Phoenix-like resurrection of their Caliphate and the sensual pleasures in the hereafter that will reward their martial sacrifices in the here and now.”

Sadly, for far too many Westerners, sensual pleasures in the here and now transcend everything, even national security. Their delusions are aided by the cadre of denialists willing to endure Islamist terrorist attacks as the price tag for multiculturalism and diversity, provided those terrorist attacks don’t reach an “existential” level. Thereligionofpeace.com website reminds us that existential level is a slippery term. Since 9/11, Islamists have carried out more than 28,045 terrorist attacks. That averages out to 1,870 attacks per year, or five per day — every year for the last 15.

On Tuesday, Fox News published a bombshell report by the nonprofit Investigative Project on Terrorism. It reveals that since 2010, terrorist attacks have increased by 800% — and a staggering average of 30,000 people per year have been killed as a result.

What changed in 2010? “I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended,”declared Obama on Aug. 31 of that year. “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”

In short, America’s withdrawal from the world stage — based on Obama’s disastrous understanding of foreign policy, coupled with his political calculations for the 2012 presidential campaign — precipitated a massive increase in bloodshed and mayhem, courtesy of terrorists more than willing to fill the resulting power vacuum. And all of this has occurred before terrorists have gotten their hands on any nuclear material, which becomes increasingly likely thanks to Obama’s deal with Iran.

Whether Western nations respond to that ultimate existential threat before it becomes reality remains to be seen. In a saner world, the gargantuan number of terrorist attacks revealed here would be more than enough to galvanize Western civilization. In a world where leftists peddle despicable comparisons between deaths from terror attacks and cancer, and assert that any disagreement with their conclusions is “giving into fear,” the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands might be the only thing that snaps Western elites and their media apparatchiks out of their ideologically induced torpor. For far too many Americans, terror is a statistical abstraction — until that abstraction literally blows up in their faces.

Arnold Ahlert