RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: The following is the first article in the FrontPage series “Obama’s Betrayals,” which will explore the president’s record of perfidy, malfeasance and crimes against the American people. As the Obama presidency enters its final stages, examples of this treachery are only becoming more numerous and brazen. “Obama’s Betrayals” will shine the spotlight on these attacks on the American polity, the incredible damage they are inflicting on the nation, and the dangerous agenda the president intends to complete before leaving office. 

It doesn’t get any more explosive than this: a high-ranking former Obama administration official charging that the administration made a conscious decision to support al-Qaeda – so where is the mainstream media?

Brad Hoff reported in Foreign Policy Journal last Friday that “in Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was ‘a willful decision.’”

When Hasan asked Flynn if “the administration turned a blind eye” to analyses explaining how the Syrian “rebels” against the Assad regime were actually Islamic jihadists who wanted to establish a hardline Sharia state in Syria, Flynn responded: “I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.”

“A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?,” asked Hasan.

Flynn responded: “It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.” That is, arm those Salafist, al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood elements, and do all they could to enable them to succeed.

One has to pause and consider the source for all this. Mehdi Hasan is a highly suspect analyst and Foreign Policy Journal appears to be a pro-jihad paleocon publication, and Al Jazeera is certainly a pro-jihad propaganda outlet. All that is noted, but if this transcript is accurate, former DIA director Michael Flynn is confirming that the Obama Administration knowingly decided to support al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and directly enabled the rise of the Islamic State.

And given the Obama Administration’s general stance toward the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, what would be unbelievable about that? It has been well known for years that Obama has energetically supported the Muslim Brotherhood – so well known that Egyptians protesting against the corrupt and tyrannical Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 held up signs calling on Obama to “stop supporting terrorism.”

But al-Qaeda? The former head of the DIA revealing that the Obama administration made a conscious decision to aid the organization that murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 and has been waging global warfare against the United States ever since? That is something else again.

It would, however, be consistent with so many odd aspects of Obama’s behavior. The President has aroused controversy over his affinity with Islam throughout his presidency, with his extravagant praise of the non-existent Islamic role in the founding and growth of the American republic, his exaggeration of Muslim achievements, his refusal to name the global jihad threat in any accurate manner, and so much more – even small incidents such as his notorious 2008 “slip of the tongue” in which he referred to “my Muslim faith,” right up to the one that broke in February 2015, when a photo surfaced from the U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit in August 2014, showing Obama passing by a group of African delegates with his right index finger raised in a gesture strongly reminiscent of the Islamic State’s now notorious one-finger salute.

That Islamic State, of course, was the direct beneficiary of Obama’s Syria policies, and now Michael Flynn has revealed that that was essentially the plan all along. So why isn’t the honking gaggle of Republican presidential candidates saying anything about this – demanding an investigation, asking Flynn for more information, imploring Obama to come clean about his Syria strategy – anything at all? In a sane political atmosphere, this would be enough to bring down the Obama presidency. Instead, it will get little notice and no action whatsoever.

Why that is so remains a mystery. Can it be that Flynn’s allegations are simply too hot to handle for everyone, and that, if taken seriously, they would bring down many more people than just Barack Obama? That seems to be the only remotely plausible explanation. But it is a deeply disquieting one.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS, is coming August 24. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.