Obama has said that we can defeat ISIS “in part” by “saying you are not strong, you are weak.” In the mean time, he sends drones to bomb the crap out of them, and sends in our special forces to help the fight on the ground.
Obama gives the image that he has some serious gaps in his knowledge of ISIS, the major one is thinking that they are a bully, and that we can deal with them like a child deals with a bully. Does he take the threat seriously?
It can be argued that the terrorist attacks, or should we call them what they are, organized attacks on our civilians, do not pose an existential threat to the United States, or to the West. But that is incorrect thinking.
Living in fear changes people, and it can slowly change a society. Everything that occurs affects a society. When the basis for marriage changed to love it was impossible to stop gay marriage, because society had changed. (I’m not equating the two, gay marriage and terrorism. I’m using the most recent major societal change to illustrate.)
We could pretend that we don’t have fear. On the March 23rd airing of the NBC Nightly News, many Belgians were interviewed, and they were saying how they will not live in fear. This is one way for a victim to survive, but it ignores the violence that took place, and does nothing to stop a repeated attack.
We could pretend that it hasn’t changed us. European leaders took to the airwaves immediately after the attack to say that we will stick to our liberty and to our democratic way of government. However, can this be backed up? Did the same leaders also not strengthen the security, which is a change to our liberties?
In the last few days, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have said that they would crack down on Muslims. Cruz wants to setup a police state in places like Dearborn and Hamtramck, Michigan. Trump wants to temporarily stop Muslims from entering the US. The only new idea is Trumps.
Believe it or not, our government is already watching the Muslims in the United States, which is why the San Bernardino couple did so much to hide what they were doing. We don’t need police patrolling the communities, because we are already listening to everything they say. (The FBI is probably listening on me, by the way, because of the monitoring. I happen to know a Palestinian who lives in Dearborn, and have been to his house a couple of times for some wonderful meals.)
Since we are listening to and watching our Muslim communities, the Obama administration does take the threat seriously, but the optics of his actions and words seem to show that he doesn’t care, or even know what is going on. Why is he acting like that, does it go to the first statement that we should call them “weak?” Is his apparent apathy strategic, or is he bored with giving the same speech over and over again?
Photo by thierry ehrmann – License CC BY 2.0 – No edits made.