Does Obama know the enemy?

Based on last night’s speech it appears that President Obama finally decided to take some action against ISIS or ISIL (whichever term one prefers). However, his definition of the enemy baffles me. He stated  that “ISIL is not “Islamic” and that “No religion condones the killing of innocents”. Where in the world does he get that conclusion? ISIL is establishing a Caliphate (which is Muslim), killing Christians if they don’t convert to Islam and are calling for Islamic Jihad. Sounds and looks pretty Islamic to me.

The notion that Islam does not condone the killing of innocents goes against reality and history. Just read their Koran and review the genocidal history against the Armenians. Ask the Coptic Christians of Egypt, the Christians in Nigeria, the Sudan and the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in Syria and Iraq. Ask the families of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and the victims of 9/11.

A cardinal principle of winning any conflict or war is “to know thy enemy” Yet, for the last six years Obama refuses to name our terrorist enemies for what they are – Islamists.  Despite evidence that Islamist terrorism is the root cause of some of the deadliest attacks on American soil–including the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI has not included them on the list of potential domestic terror threats in its most recently published domestic terror assessment (National Threat Assessment for Domestic Extremism- 2014).

What is disturbing is that the exclusion of Islamist terrorists as threats is matched by the inclusion of disgruntled veterans, Catholics and pro life organizations in various FBI, Homeland Security and Army National Guard Reports on domestic extremists (see April 10, 2013 blog “A Comment from an extremist”). Add to this the outrageous assertion by his administration that the killings at Ft. Hood were a case of “workplace violence” and the question must be raised “Why won’t Obama call our enemy who they are”? The spectrum of opinion ranges from him being politically naive; to the fact his father was Muslim and he had attended a Muslim school in Indonesia (which he did) to him being a “closet Muslim”. Whatever the reason, his unwillingness to recognize who and what ideology we are fighting limits our ability to predict, plan and to win a war which has been declared on us.