DEAR OBAMA: How Many MORE Terrorism Deaths Are ACCEPTABLE?
Obama didn’t go to Paris in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. When San Bernardino occurred he ignored most of it – focusing instead on his gun control agenda while temporarily toning down his insistence that police departments be “de-militarized” (just imagine what would have happened in San Bernardino if law enforcement there had been disarmed before Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik launched their attack). Chattanooga. Beirut. Turkey. Paris. After each attack, Obama didn’t take tangible steps to address radical Islamic terrorism.
So it went with Belgium. As Brussels burned – and Americans were counted among the victims – he did the wave at a baseball game in Havana, lectured Argentinian students that capitalism and communism weren’t all that different after all, and was led around a dance floor in an awkward version of the tango.
Yes, Obama eventually made it to a podium where his teleprompter gave him something to say about Belgium. And yes, he said what he’s said before. That ISIS was his top priority on an already “full plate”. That we were winning in our efforts against them. So nothing to worry about. After all, US special forces just took out the number two ISIS leader.
Which is great news. However, at the press conference announcing the elimination of ISIS Finance Minister Abd al-Rahmann Mustafa al-Qaduli, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dunford admitted “by no means” are we “about to break the back of ISIS”.
Obama doesn’t think ISIS or terrorism inspired by radical Islam is a problem. That’s why we aren’t about to break the back of the Islamic State. It’s why what happened in Belgium will be repeated again in either western Europe or the United States.
“They’re not coming here to chop heads off”, Obama reportedly told Valerie Jarrett in 2014. Whether this was before or after the Sept 24, 2014 decapitation at a Vaughan Foods plant in Moore, Oklahoma isn’t clear. But, it did follow a series of ISIS videos that featured beheadings. As reported in the April 2016 edition of The Atlantic, Obama went on to explain that “hand guns, car accidents, and falls in bath tubs” kill more Americans each year than terrorism.
That’s true.
But so what?
Is Obama saying that a certain number of deaths due to terrorism is acceptable, and that we need not treat terror as a problem until death tolls surpass that threshold? Reminiscent of the Ford Pinto crisis isn’t it. (For those unfamiliar, during the 1970s Ford’s Pinto was found to lack adequate gas tank protection in rear-end crashes, which often caused the subcompact to go up in flames even in low-speed crashes. After several deaths, it was discovered that Ford had been willing to accept the risks associated with a poor car design – provided the number of fatalities didn’t exceed a certain level – instead of going back and retrofitting Pintos with adequate gas tank protection at a cost of about $11 per vehicle. In other words, Ford had a death toll threshold they were willing to view as acceptable).
If there is a death toll threshold, when do we the American people get to learn what it is? Not just what it is, but why it’s acceptable that X number of people are killed via terrorism?
Since when have liberals ever settled on an acceptable threshold for anything they think is bad? Like guns. Liberals hate guns and want more laws on the books to regulate them into non-existence. Following Obama’s logic, car accidents and prescription drug abuse kill more Americans each year than hand guns do. So why worry about guns unless the death toll rises and exceeds that of car accidents and prescription drug abuse? Liberals would never say that – rather, they’d insist on gun control, gun control, and a little more gun control.
Or, take the example of climate change. Liberals say one of two things about climate change – that we must either stop it, or reverse it. They never tolerate the things they say contribute to climate change. Certainly, they never cite things that are worse than climate change and use those as their rationale to worry less about the health of our planet.
Racism, sexism, Islamophobia, LGBT-ism are treated likewise. There are activist groups left of center that exist solely to “eliminate” these – and other – isms from our culture. These groups are so profuse they can find an ism virtually anywhere at any time. They do this because they believe any hint of an ism must be eradicated wholesale from all existence past, present, and future. They certainly aren’t suggesting that while all the various isms are bad, more people are killed each year in America by hand guns, car accidents, and falls in bath tubs, as a way to put their isms into perspective.
Why then in terrorism different? Why is a little bit acceptable in Obama’s view? Must we wait for it’s body count to rise before we do something about it?