RUTHFULLY YOURS

Orlando’s Pulse nightclub terror attack will go down in U.S. history as the single largest case of mass slaughter ever conducted by a lone gunman in the nation’s 240-year history. Barack Obama’s shameful but predictable response to the carnage can best be characterized as deceitful spin involving a two-part strategy of obfuscation.

The first part involves deflection. Divert America’s attention from the main culprit – Islamic terrorism – to forwarding dual strawman/red herring arguments designed to confuse and mislead. By doing so, he hoped to draw America’s attention away from his own flawed foreign and domestic policies which enabled the ISIS-inspired Muslim terrorist to commit mass slaughter.

Obama cleverly but disingenuously framed the issue as a gun control matter, cynically exploiting the tragedy to advance his agenda for further eroding Second Amendment rights. In his eyes, it was the AR-15 sporting rifle (which turned out not to be the gun that was actually employed) and the National Rifle Association that bore direct responsibility for the killings. He then referred to the carnage as a “hate crime” directed against the gay community, completely glossing over the central role played by a malevolent political ideology that seeks to dominate and impose Sharia law on the West.

In fact, Omar Mateen never expressed anti-gay animus during his 911 rants to police though he did express disdain for U.S. foreign policies and unambiguously professed his Islamic leanings and allegiance to the Islamic State. Moreover, he scouted other locations, having no nexus with the LGBT community, before finally settling on the Pulse nightclub to execute his diabolical plans. Perhaps he did so because he was familiar with the club’s layout, having been there on multiple prior occasions as a patron. Or perhaps he viewed it a soft target in which he could easily inflict mass carnage. No one will know for certain why he chose Pulse but Obama has already set the agenda and charted a course for its trajectory. That trajectory places Americans on a thought process that deliberately diverts attention away from the main causes and culprits.

Taking cue from her boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed to release a sanitized transcript of the exchanges between Mateen and police. References to the terrorist’s Islamist proclivities and revulsion of the West were to have been redacted with the aim of adding a further layer of opaqueness to confuse the public but public outcry forced a stunning reversal of that decision.

For those still unconvinced by the White House’s blatantly transparent pivoting techniques, Obama has adopted his fallback position – lie to the American people. Immediately following the Orlando attack, Obama, echoing past claims, alleged that ISIS was on the defensive and that the U.S. was mustering all its resources to wipe the terrorist group off the face of the earth. Again, Obama spins a web of lies from a kernel of truth.

While it is true that ISIS has suffered reversals in Syria and Iraq in recent months, the group still maintains a sizable force in that region of between 18,000 to 22,000 fighters. The terrorist group has also succeeded in establishing a sizable presence in Libya, just beneath the soft underbelly of southern Europe and its malign influence continues to spread in Nigeria, Egypt and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Arab and Muslim migrants from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and North Africa, a disproportionate number of them young males, continue to stream into Western Europe. No one knows precisely how many among the migrants are operating as sleeper cells but it is confirmed that at least two of the Paris gunmen, who murdered 130 people, disguised themselves as “refugees.”

Obama’s policy of utilizing pinprick airstrikes against ISIS targets represents but a fraction of the havoc capable of being brought to bear against the terror group if the U.S. chose to employ readily available resources. Instead, the administration has stumbled and stammered throughout its campaign against ISIS, vacillating between denial of the emerging ISIS threat and halting use of resources to engage the enemy.

American intelligence had correctly assessed the international threat posed by ISIS many months before the group turned into the menace that it is today. But Obama cast aside those assessments and dismissively referred to the group as the “JV team.” Following the Paris attacks, Obama absurdly referred to the massacre as a mere “setback,” outraging allies and opponents alike. And after the Hypercacher slaughter, he referred to the Jewish victims murdered in the kosher supermarket as “folks in a deli” who were “randomly” shot by “zealots.” The fact that Muslims had carried out a massacre against Jews wasn’t important enough to note. Time and again, he has misjudged, mischaracterized and mismanaged the conflict against Islamic terrorism, refusing to even employ the term!

Moreover, Obama’s own CIA director, John Brennan, flatly contradicted his boss’s rosy outlook. In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee just after the Orlando attack, Brennan noted that “despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.” The director and his boss are not seeing eye-to-eye on matters of grave concern to the American public.

Obama needs to focus his attention on securing the broken border and improving border controls while at the same time, ramping up attacks against ISIS and doing more to assist regional allies. Had he acted sooner and with vigilance, ISIS could have been neutered before it metastasized and attacks witnessed in both Europe and the United States could have been thwarted. Moreover, if the administration had been doing its job properly, people like Tashfeen Malik, who together with her husband murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, would never have passed border controls and would have been promptly sent back on a one-way ticket to Pakistan.

But the Obama administration has learned nothing from the lessons of recent terror attacks and continues with the policies of deflection and obfuscation. FPM’s Robert Spencer recently authored a piece highlighting some very disconcerting events unfolding along the Mexican border that underscore the seriousness and imminence of the Islamic terror threat. Narco-terrorists and Islamists have partnered in an effort to cause immeasurable harm to America’s citizens. In the most recent incident, an “Islamic refugee,” pulled over during a routine traffic stop in Luna County, New Mexico was found to be “in possession of the region’s gas pipeline plans.”

In the words of some of his top advisers and shills, Obama will continue to rely on the “stupidity of the American voter” and will continue to create “echo chamber[s]” designed to further advance false narratives that deflect and obfuscate. Meanwhile, our border remains dangerously porous and Islamic terror continues to take its toll on innocent civilians.