Alan Keyes has joined a growing chorus of far-right activists who claim that President Obama is secretly supporting ISIS, writing today in WorldNetDaily that Obama administration officials believe “the enemy is not ISIS, but the life and liberty of the people of the United States.”
Keyes writes that Obama’s remarks on ISIS are “calculated to obfuscate the charge of treason that ought to be duly brought and tried if and when a serious investigation shows it to be a fact that that Obama and his cohorts aided and abetted the terrorist forces that constitute ISIS.”
He claims that Obama administration officials funded ISIS “because they knew the declared aim of the terrorist forces in question and understood, therefore, that those forces are committed to making implacable war on the people of the United States and their self-government.”
Once we remember this root meaning we realize that, in order to understand what strategy is at work, we must first answer the critical question: Who is the enemy? In light of their declared hostility toward the United States, and the grisly murders they have perpetrated on account of it, we naturally assume that, when someone purporting to be the president of the United States speaks of a strategy for dealing with ISIS we are right to assume that they are the enemy. But the statements and actions of Obama and his cohorts suggest the likelihood that, in the strategy he is pursuing, the enemy is not ISIS, but the life and liberty of the people of the United States.
In his statement after Jim Foley was murdered Obama said disparagingly of the perpetrators that “They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors. …” He was speaking in the context of the gruesomely hostile murder of an innocent American citizen, dramatically enacted and publicized as an act of war against the United States. So what sense did it make to imply that the perpetrators’ claim to be at war with us is at all questionable?
It makes no sense, except perhaps as a lawyer’s quibble. Taken as such, it seems calculated to obfuscate the charge of treason that ought to be duly brought and tried if and when a serious investigation shows it to be a fact that that Obama and his cohorts aided and abetted the terrorist forces that constitute ISIS; that they did so in ways that risked and eventually claimed American lives, including innocent civilians, and military, diplomatic and security personnel, e.g., at Benghazi; and that they did so covertly precisely because they knew the declared aim of the terrorist forces in question and understood, therefore, that those forces are committed to making implacable war on the people of the United States and their self-government.
