Obama: 'We' are to Blame, Not Islamic Terrorism, for Massacre

 

By John Podhoretz
NYPost.com

President Barack Obama leaves the podium after speaking about the massacre at an Orlando nightclub during a news conference at the White House in Washington on Sunday, June 12, 2016. (AP)

Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murderer in Orlando early Sunday morning. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.”

So I guess the president thinks Mateen didn’t mean it?

Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.

He called it “terror,” which it is. But using the word “terror” without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease “cancer” without making note of the affected area of the body — because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes, he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.

So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.

Friends and family members embrace outside the Orlando Police Headquarters after the the Pulse Orlando nightclub mass shooting.Photo: Reuters

America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea-change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.

An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite.

The attack on the Pulse nightclub was an attack on us all, no less than the World Trade Center attack.

To suggest we must look inward to explain this is not only unseemly but practically an act of conscious misdirection on the president’ s part to direct out attention away from Omar Mateen’s phone call.

True to form, the president spoke more words about the scourge of guns than about the threat of terror. In doing so, he actually retards rather than advances the cause of gun control he so passionately advocates.

A president totally and credibly committed to the destruction of ISIS and other terror groups seeking to bring the war to us might earn the political and moral capital to seek more extensive limits on gun ownership.

A president who cannot name the enemy even as he anthropomorphizes the weapon the enemy is a president unable to bring anyone to his side who’s not already there.

To fight back against the evils of San Bernardino and Orlando, we do need change — and fortunately for us, it’s constitutionally mandated change. It’s the change required by the 22nd Amendment — the change that will compel Barack Obama to leave the White House on January 20, 2017 after completing his second term with America less safe than it was when he took office.