RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Friday, American citizens living in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East received an email titled “Emergency Message.”

The message read as follows: “The Department of State has instructed certain U.S. Embassies and Consulates to remain closed or to suspend operations on Sunday, August 4. The Department has been apprised of information that, out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting our installations, indicates we should institute these precautionary steps. It is possible we may have additional days of closings as well, depending on our analysis. The Department, when conditions warrant, takes steps like this to balance our continued operations with security and safety. However, beyond this announcement, we do not discuss specific threat information, security considerations or measures, or other steps we may be taking.”

This alert, cloaked in vague diplo-euphemism, was highly noteworthy, but not because of what it suggested. Israelis have grown so used to living under the threat of terrorism that we take its open-ended nature for granted.

No, what was striking about the email was that it constituted a historic first. Indeed, in all the decades that I have lived in Jerusalem and held a U.S. passport along with an Israeli one, I have never been notified of anything remotely like it from the American government.

Within minutes, every news outlet and website was running the story, pointing to Aug. 4 as a critical day on which Americans living in or touring the Middle East and North Africa must be especially cautious. This, said the State Department, was due to the very real possibility that al-Qaida and its affiliates “may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of [the month].”

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey revealed that al-Qaida was planning to attack, but the exact location and extent of its operation was “unspecified.”

The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Mike Rogers, called the concrete threat a “sober reminder of al-Qaida’s determination and ongoing intention to commit acts of violence on Western and U.S. targets.”

Britain, France and Germany also decided to close their embassies in Yemen. The British Foreign Office released a statement on Friday explaining: “We are particularly concerned about the security situation in the final days of Ramadan and into Eid [the festival that follows the fasting month of Ramadan].”

It seems that the extra “precautions” being promoted are connected to the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi last Sept. 11. During that event, four people were killed, among them U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.

Though the State Department and the White House claimed the slaughter was a case of spontaneous combustion, caused by an American-made video that was offensive to Muslims, the attack was carefully planned to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. It was not anger sparked by the video, but rather a massive celebration of Islam’s defeat of the West.

The subsequent scandal surrounding the Benghazi attack — apparently carried out by al-Qaida affiliates — is still haunting the Obama administration. The current closures of U.S. installations are clearly part of an attempt to show that the government is doing its job of taking intelligence reports seriously, and of acting responsibly in response.

But President Barack Obama, who was briefed and updated throughout the weekend on a potentially explosive situation taking place in the immediate future, should not be too pleased with his performance as commander-in-chief. Instead, he ought to be apologizing for bragging about having brought down al-Qaida.

Other than playing golf, taking credit for killing Osama bin Laden has become his favorite pastime, one he particularly enjoyed while running for his second term. In fact, at a campaign event in Las Vegas on the day after the Benghazi attack, he said, “We are reminded that a new tower rises above the New York skyline, but al-Qaida is on the path to defeat and bin Laden is dead.”

For the next several weeks, he reiterated this falsehood in different variations, sometimes stating that “al-Qaida has been decimated.”

More recently, after the Boston Marathon bombings in April, he assured everyone that al-Qaida’s “remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us. They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston…”

For its part, al-Qaida has been doing a good job of showing that it is still a force to be reckoned with, even after the death of its founder. That’s the thing about successful terrorist networks: They would not survive and thrive if their entire infrastructure depended on one individual. Bin Laden may be gone, but his ideology and methods are alive and ticking, like his bombs.

Whether or not the very credible threat of bloodshed from al-Qaida quarters is realized this month, the organization can feel satisfied that it brought the U.S. to its knees in fearful anticipation of horrors to come. That is the “emergency message” that should be flooding our inboxes.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”