Obama must be frustrating the hell out of ISIS

Obama must be frustrating the hell out of ISIS

When Barack Obama pledged in 2014 to “degrade and ultimately defeat” ISIS, maybe this is what he had in mind: to frustrate them to death.

Yesterday, a heavily armed madman entered a gay night club in Orlando, Fla., in the small hours of the morning. Before all was said and done, fifty people lay dead lay dead — 51 if you include the gunman, Omar Mateen.

Motivation? The gunman’s father told authorities that his son had been angered by the sight of men kissing, which is hardly surprising: Homosexuality is a sin in Islam punishable by death.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Oh, did I neglect to mention that Mateen was a Muslim? In fact, appears to have been radicalized, despite his father’s claim to the contrary. Before going down in a hail of police bullets, Mateen pledged his fealty to ISIS, even shouting “Allahu akbar!”

Speaking of ISIS, although this may be the sheerest of coincidences, the terrorist organization just this past week released a “kill list” of potential targets living on Florida’s Treasure Coast … which (wouldn’t you know?) is where Omar Mateen lived.

This morning, CNN reports, the official online ISIS radio channel, Al-Bayan, described the massacre as a “raid on a Crusader gathering” and praised Mateen as “one of the Caliphate’s soldiers in America.”

It would seem as though there are plenty of connectable dots. But the president in his statement to the nation was willing to concede only that this was an act of anonymous “terror” carried out by a “person filled with hate.”

As John Podhoretz reminds us:

[U]sing the word ‘terror’ without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease ‘cancer’ without making note of the affected area of the body — because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes, he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.

So what is Dr. Obama’s prescription for what ails us? That we in America need “the strength and courage to change.”

Wait, we need to change? Change what? For one thing, we need to be more accepting of the LGBTQ community. For another…

Today marks the most deadly shooting in American history. The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.

As a strategy for eliminating terrorism, disarming the nation’s citizens sounds crazy. But maybe he’s crazy like a fox. Maybe eventually the Islamic terrorists will become so exasperated by Obama’s refusal to blame them for anything that they’ll blow their own brains out.

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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