Obama: Media Overstates Terror Threat

Posted By Robert Spencer On February 10, 2015 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 12 Comments

Obama’s timing couldn’t be worse. Just as a new report has demonstrated yet again that global warming is a hoax, he has backed it in a new interview as a “longer-term” problem than jihad terror.

During a lengthy conversation published over two days by the far-Left publication Vox, interviewer Matthew Yglesias asked Obama: “Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease?”

Obama readily agreed – and his full answer was revealing in several ways:

Absolutely. And I don’t blame the media for that. What’s the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right? You show crime stories and you show fires, because that’s what folks watch, and it’s all about ratings.…And climate change is one that is happening at such a broad scale and at such a complex system, it’s a hard story for the media to tell on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately for Obama, it isn’t really even happening at all. Christopher Booker wrote in the Telegraph on Saturday that “official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically ‘adjusted’ to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.” He noted that a researcher had “checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.”

But Obama is entirely oblivious – and worse. He refers to “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” No one was randomly shot in that “deli in Paris.” It was a kosher supermarket, and the people who were murdered there were murdered because they were Jews. They were murdered by people who were animated by the Qur’an’s relentless Jew-hatred and labeling of the Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (5:82). But that, too, is a threat that Obama dares not name.

Throughout the interview, Obama maintains his carefully cultivated and sustained obliviousness about the jihad threat – an obliviousness that is now, thanks to Obama, official U.S. policy. It was not at all surprising that in the section of the Vox interview that was devoted to foreign policy, Obama never once mentions Islam, or even “Islamist.” He does refer to “violent extremism,” which seems to be his euphemism of choice these days, as it is also the name of his Countering Violent Extremism summit, which should be renamed Countering the Threat We Dare Not Name.

It’s also significant that he gave this massive, detailed, extensive interview to Vox, a hard-Left publication that just last Saturday was claiming that those who took issue with Obama’s reprehensible moral equivalence regarding the Crusades were just looking for an excuse to hate Muslims. That is the milieu from which Obama comes, and in which he is most comfortable. Vox’s perspective is, almost certainly, his world view as well: that those who believe that Islam uniquely teaches and justifies violence in a way that Christianity and other religions do not are motivated solely by hatred of Muslims. This is the line that Hamas-linked CAIR and its henchmen have promoted for years. In the White House today, they have their most powerful champion ever.

Neither Vox nor Obama appear prepared to acknowledge that resistance to jihad terror is not “hate,” or that the Crusaders did not justify violence by invoking Christian texts and teachings, because there were no such texts and teachings justifying those terrible deeds – a sharp contrast to the Islamic jihadists who regularly invoke the Qur’an to justify their actions.

Nor do Vox or Obama appear aware or interested in the fact that the Crusaders’ atrocities are entirely irrelevant to any jihad conflict today. Even if the Crusaders were the twelfth-century equivalent of the Islamic State, with equivalent atrocities (although they weren’t, really), that would not free Obama and his Administration from the responsibility to identify the true nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, and deal with it realistically.

But that is about as likely as his naming Michele Bachmann the next Secretary of Defense.

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