When President Obama blames climate change for stoking terrorism, he’s trying to play us all for saps. He’s doing what Hollywood exploitation movies have done since the 1920s — latching on to a widespread fear, mixing in lurid content and hoping to turn it to his profit.
Quick and dirty movie-making was low and clever. But Obama’s exploitation is only disreputable, not smart. It makes him an even more distant and discredited leader, hopelessly out of touch with the legitimate fears of the public whose mind he wants to change.
Speaking on “CBS This Morning,” the president said, “As human beings are placed under strain [from climate change], then bad things happen… If you look at world history, whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families, that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous.”
Sure, people in desperate straits take extreme measures. But there’s no evidence that terrorists are driven by desperation, and their dangerous ideology is already here. The terrorists we face today, rather than possible others somewhere in the future, are far from desperate or lacking in much materially. Osama bin Laden was the scion of a Saudi family steeped in petro-dollars. The Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers were not starving or indigent, but members of the comfortable middle class. Syed Farook, the butcher of San Bernardino, was a man with a wife and child, working in a steady job in what, not for nothing, is called the Golden State.
Young people do not abandon comfortable lives in France, Belgium, Britain and the United States, join the Islamic State and inflict terror on the world because they are driven by terrible circumstances. They do not lack food or the ability to make a living and take care of their families, the evils Obama enumerates.
Why emphasize future threats when there are immediate dangers to deal with? The answer is that Obama lacks the essential quality of a leader, which is to respond appropriately to actual events. Reality is not as he imagines it to be. He is still stuck in the rhetorical magic that won him the election, in love with the idea of turning back the rising seas. The facts of the world around him do not engage him as much as those in the theoretical and ideological enclave where he has spent his life.
What’s real, according to a study published Friday by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, is that, “The phenomenon of Americans joining jihadist groups is not new, but the size of the ISIS-related radicalization and mobilization is unprecedented.” What’s real is that the massacre in San Bernardino was terrorism for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
The tenuous and overblown threat of climate change grips Obama, but he sees Islamist terrorism as an inconvenient distraction or a tool with which to frighten people into accepting his climate agenda. He’s alarmed about 1.7 degrees of global warming by the year 2030 because it fits his ideological worldview. He’s much less interested in the immediate danger posed by a significant minority of the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims, because it doesn’t.
