While President Obama endlessly carries on in Paris about the global threat of climate change, Americans sit at home wondering how safe they are, watching as their president visits the city devastated by ISIS inspired militants just weeks ago. They are confused and unsure if the threat of terror is real and if it will ever impact them directly.
The president has assured us that we have nothing to be afraid of, and that living in fear plays into the hand of our enemy. But then his State Department issued a worldwide travel warning that extends through February 2016, leaving Americans with uncertainty during one of our most vulnerable times of the year – a paradox to say the least.
Time and again, President Obama has said that the biggest issue facing America today is climate change – that it’s the most important problem America faces, and that it’s the largest threat to our national security. So have many in his party. But, as rational human beings and logical thinkers, we must know this simply isn’t true.
Regardless of your likely predetermined position on the climate change debate, we truly have no way of knowing whether or not humans have directly caused the heating of our climate. We also don’t know if curbing emissions, even on a global scale, will reduce how much our climate warms over the next century.
Furthermore, liberals say we must listen to the science, but there is plenty of science that combats their stance as well. For instance, Milankovitch Cycles and other scientific theories explain how the Earth’s climate can warm naturally based on its eccentricity and obliquity in orbit. The truth is that we know the Earth is heating, but nobody knows exactly why it’s happening.
It’s also amusing that liberals – who commonly tout the Republican Party as the party of fear – hold their tongue in the face of real violence and terror, but are the first to tell us the sky is falling when we discuss climate change.
Every realist knows climate change is not the biggest or most important issue facing America today, and that it’s certainly nowhere near the top of the list of national security threats. After the attacks in Paris, we should all know that ISIS is the biggest national security threat our country faces.
Here are some undisputed statistics that our president would hate to acknowledge – global terrorism has increased 80 percent under his watch from 2013 to 2014. Approximately 32,658 lives were lost around the world from terrorism in 2014, mostly in attacks carried out by ISIS and Boko Haram militants. It’s conservatively estimated that global terror cost the world more than $52 billion in 2014 alone.
Additionally, a George Washington University study shows that 56 Americans have been arrested this year in connection with the Islamic State, the most terrorism-related arrests in a single year since 2001, the year of the 9/11 attacks. Many Americans were arrested for trying to board airplanes in hopes of traveling overseas to fight for ISIS, and for posing serious domestic threats after being in contact with Islamic State extremists on social media.
The average age of the American sympathizer in the GWU study was 26. It also noted that roughly 14 percent of those arrested this year were women. Not only are terror groups wreaking havoc overseas, but they are using social media sites like Twitter to find youthful recruits willing to coordinate and carry out attacks on American “infidels.”
Obama must understand that ISIS can’t be combated with lame-duck rhetoric, or by pretending they don’t exist. They do exist, and they take the lives of innocent civilians all around the world.
We can argue to no end about the validity of climate change, but there is no contesting the growing relevance of terror in our society. Americans watch radical groups like ISIS slay innocent civilians each day, while some our most absorbent citizens are being ideologically tainted through the internet. And somehow, we’re supposed to believe President Obama when he insists that there are more important issues in the world to take care of.
Yet as he nears the final year of his second term as leader of the free world, he has still done nothing meaningful to stop the spread of global terror.
