There is reality, there is perception, and there is deception, either purposeful or self-deception.
In 2009, Nidal Hassan, a self-proclaimed jihadist, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is great) as he fatally shot 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. The Obama administration subsequently described the worst massacre ever at an American military base as “Workplace violence.”
A month later, on Christmas Day in 2009, the “Underwear Bomber,” Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to blow up a Northwest Airline flight over Detroit by detonating a bomb hidden in his undershorts. Given multiple life sentences he proclaimed he was “proud to kill in the name of God,” and confessed that he had been trained and sent on his mission by al-Qaeda. The Obama administration called him an “an isolated extremist.”
During his campaign for re-election, President Obama regularly described al-Qaeda as “on the run,” or “on the path to defeat.” Actually, according to Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, “When asked if the terrorists were on the run, we couldn’t respond with any answer except ‘no.” Flynn said, adding, “When asked if the terrorists were defeated, we had to say ‘no.’ Anyone who said yes to either of those questions doesn’t know what he is talking about.” Flynn was forced to retire early from DIA.
In January 2014, the journalist David Remnick asked President Obama his opinion of the radical Islamic group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham), which had just taken control of the Iraqi city of Fallujah. “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think it is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” he said Later, when even he realized that ISIS was no jayvee team, he still insisted, “[ISIS] is not Islamic.” That is, a terrorist organization that has the words “Islamic State” in its name is not Islamic.
On January 9, 2015, four Jews were gunned down in a Kosher supermarket in Paris. Earlier the gunman told a Paris TV station that he deliberately targeted Jews in retaliation for “oppressed Muslims” in Palestine. The fact that only Jews would likely be found in a Kosher market did not dissuade President Obama from describing it as “vicious zealots … randomly shooting a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” He added that climate change may be more dangerous than terrorism today.
In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama said, “For the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its [Iran’s] nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.” Of all of his statements of deception, or self-deception, that is probably the most egregious.
