Barack Obama's Selective Existentialism

Barack Obama, who has no problem ginning up a public freak out about impending climate doom, insisted the other day via his hyper-loyal factotum Susan Rice that ISIS and their ilk pose no existential threat to the U.S. So quit your frettin', angst-ridden Americans, because even if the jihadis kill you in, say, a brothers Tsarnaev sort of way, or Major Nidal Hassan-style, the country as a whole will still continue to, well, exist. (And were Iran to get it's heart desire, which is to say a slew of nuclear weapons? Obama is oddly--no, eerily--silent re that existential peril.)

Someone who doesn't dismiss the threat of jihad--Andrew J. McCarthy--draws our attention to a few facts that the short-sighted Obama and his cadre have chosen to ignore:

We know from experience that when jihadists have safe havens, they attack the United States. They now have more safe havens than they’ve ever had before — not just because of what the Islamic State has accomplished in what used to be Syria and Iraq (the map of the Middle East needs updating) but because of what al-Qaeda has done there and in North Africa, what the Taliban and al-Qaeda are doing in Afghanistan, and so on. 

If we understand, as we by now should, what these safe havens portend, then we must grasp that the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the global jihad constitute a threat to American national security. That they also (and more immediately) threaten Arab Islamic countries is true, but it is not close to being our top concern. Ensuring our security is a concern that could not be responsibly delegated to other countries even if they had formidable armed forces — which the “coalition” countries do not. 

The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are our problem.