If you did not notice, Mr. President, the attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo, and the hostage-taking by terrorists of a Parisian kosher shop , defeats any attempt to minimize the seriousness of Islamic terrorism.   Following Fort Hood,   Boston, London, Volgograd, Brussels, New York, Ottawa, and Sydney, we must now view the cities of the Western free world, as well as Russian cities, as a second battle front in this war.  The first is Iraq, Syria, South Yemen, and Northern Africa including Libya, Nigeria and Chechnya.  

 

 

This is not “workplace violence” and your inability to use the necessary vocabulary – “Islamic terrorism”-- creates the image of a leader who is out of touch and not capable of leading the Western world in this new global struggle. 

 

 

Face it!  This is unfurling and metastasizing as an all-out battle between Islamic terrorists and   countries with large Christian-Judaic traditions, including the Western world and Russia.  Asia and and some Muslim countries are also at risk.   Recall the attack on a Muslim school in Peshawar with the “wrong” brand of Islam.   What the Islamists practice, with, their medieval, religious-racist ideology, resembles nothing so much as Adolf Hitler´s "Mein Kampf."  Yet, we have heard nothing to persuade us that you are aware of the vast dimensions of the threat, or willing to do what you must do to counter it.  Certainly you have not warned and rallied the American public. You must tell them this:  “It no longer matters whether the terrorists are trained in the camps and battlefields of Chechnya, South Yemen, Syria and Iraq, or whether they are lone wolf Islamists unable to join the wolf pack.  This is war and we must win it.”

 

   

You should consider some of your mistakes:  Dissimulating the decimation of Al Qaeda when it was growing elsewhere, the cover-up of Benghazi-gate by key officials, you’re many months of deleterious hesitation over encountering ISIS on its early march to Iraq and Syria, and your broken promise to confront Boko Haram and liberate the captured girls.  Nothing succeeds like success – even for terrorists, and your inaction has only contributed to the greatest threat to Western civilization since the dual plagues of Hitler and Stalin. 

 

 

Your comments, and those of Al Sharpton and Mayor de Blasio, have conditioned the dangerous rift that has developed between the NYPD and City Hall in a city which suffered 9/11.  Speaking about Ferguson at the U.N. was a similar mistake that emboldened our foes in the belief that our nation´s racial rift provides an opportunity for further attacks.

 

 

Your “reset” with Russia after their intervention in Georgia gave the wrong signals to the Kremlin, but also to the Islamists.  Also evident was both your failure to arm Kiev –which would have increased the cost of war to Putin – and your ability to engage in preventive diplomacy with him.  Now with the decline of oil prices, you have a new opportunity to forge peace in the Ukraine and to engage Putin as our natural ally in our war against terrorism.  Recall the statesmanship of Winston Churchill and FDR.  Believing they had to unite even with the devil against Hitler, they both sought alliance with Stalin – who was only too glad to comply. 

 

 

 FDR also ordered ASW warfare against the Nazi subs and FBI actions against the German agents in America, but also in the Western hemisphere.   Nazi saboteurs were promptly executed when captured in America.  One cannot imagine FDR closing GITMO.  Nor would he have fought them by only killing them and not trying to capture and gather intelligence from them.

 

 

  In short, Mr. President, we both were enthusiastic about your becoming our commander in chief six years ago, believing it would be the new era you announced.  Unfortunately, your presidency so far has turned into a unmitigated failure, surely in foreign affairs.  You still have the opportunity to follow FDR on the war and Bill Clinton, who found  rapprochement with the GOP.  

 

 

  The future of our country is at stake.  If we do not use our forces to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and reverse the march of their affiliates in Nigeria, North Africa and South Yemen, we will shortly be facing three or four caliphates practicing draconian Sharia law.  If you wait, the U.S.  will eventually have to mobilize American boys in a global war.  Now is the time to reverse it by  sending special forces in to defeat ISIS.

 

 

Mr. President,  just imagine  FDR preparing and conducting the war with Nazis and not calling them “Nazis.”  You must change your tune from Cumbaya to a Souza march. 

 This is what you must do quickly:

 

 

1. Stop minimizing the threat.  You can´t avoid this war.  It has come to you.  

2. Identify the threat as Islamist terrorists. 

3.    Warn and assist the potential  targets;  U.S. military personnel, police, churches and

       synagogues,  as well as  media and persons critical of Islam.

4.    Restore needed cuts to the military

5.    Deploy special forces in Syria and Iraq and aim at destroying ISIS in the shortest time

       possible.  You must do it as the French have done in Mali.  

6.    Do your best to calm racial strife and emphasize the importance of our brave police.

7.    Stop overuse of drones which kill subjects who could provide vital HUMID intelligence.

8.    Keep GITMO open and stop releasing terrorists.

9.    Seriously address the issue of emigration from rogue Muslim nations.  

10.  Begin an all-out, long-term  outreach to peaceful Muslims  on every level, federal, state and

        local.   This is an ideological war.

11.  Stop trying to aid Palestinian independence.  Hamas will form another caliphate.

12.  Work out a Ukraine compromise with Putin and an alliance against the Islamists. 

 

Finally, remember the words of the brave French editor, Stephane Charbonnier, who said “I´d rather die standing than live on my knees.”  Or think of Churchill who called courage “the ladder on which all virtue mounts.”