“Lieutenant al-Kasasbeh’s dedication, courage, and service to his country and family represent universal human values that stand in opposition to the cowardice and depravity of ISIL, which has been so broadly rejected around the globe.”

Barack Obama, 3 February 2015 (www.whitehouse.gov)

President Obama’s reality-free statement about the Islamic State’s (IS) burning to death of a Jordanian Air Force pilot who had bombed the mujahideen before he crashed and was captured is par for the course. In a world where, under Obama’s watch, the military and media power, armaments, manpower, ideological appeal, and geographical reach of IS and other Islamist groups have grown exponentially, the president claims IS and the Islamist movement have been “broadly rejected around the globe.” Over the weekend, Obama also was quoted by Real Clear Politics as saying the United States and the West make too much of the Islamist movement because, after all, it is not an “existential threat.” This statement came after a month in which the West saw three important NATO leaders — Cameron, Harper, and Hollande — respond to the lethal Islamist attacks in Paris and Ottawa, not by killing the enemy mercilessly, but by seeking stronger internal security measures that will further constrict the civil liberties of their own citizens. That shoe does not yet seem to have fallen in the United States, but probably only because Obama and Eric Holder — with broad Republican support — have already shattered the protections afforded to civil liberty by the 4th Amendment.

If common sense might for a moment be used in place of Obama’s theoretical fantasizing, the ever tightening noose around civil liberties in the United States and Europe — the latter is too bad, but irrelevant to U.S. interests and typical of the authoritarian EU — seems to indeed pose an existential threat to the ability of the American people to live as they want to, rather than as they have to. An existential threat does not necessarily have to be nuclear in nature. Americans have had three consecutive presidents — Clinton, Bush, and Obama — who have been confronted by the Islamists’ mortal and growing threat to the United States and each has refused to kill it with the most powerful and expensive military the world has ever known. Nearly twenty years into this war, it seems crystal clear that the combination of the Islamists’ piety, determination, talent, and ruthlessness with the politically correct moral cowardice of U.S. presidents — not to mention Obama’s tyrannical bent — does indeed yield an existential threat to the American people, their property, their way of life, and their Constitution.

Much more could be said on this issue, but all of it would arrive at the same bottom line; namely, if we are neither prepared to abandon the U.S. foreign policies that are the main motivators of the Islamists nor ready to militarily annihilate the Islamist groups, their civilian supporters, and whatever infrastructure they control, U.S. citizens must accept the fact that continuing Islamist attacks will be used by the U.S. government — under either party — to slowly eliminate their civil liberties in the name of domestic security. Americans gradually will be enslaved in their own land because their presidents and leading politicians prefer that end-product to having to admit that their unchanged policies and deliberately lost wars have allowed the Islamist movement to grow from a lethal nuisance to an existential threat. For Americans, the reality is that of a two-front war, one which they will have to wage against a de facto alliance of their own politicians and the Islamists. Both are equally their enemy; both merit the most severe punishment.