ISIS’s immolation of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot renewed international disgust with the group’s tactics. Lost in much of the hyperbole over the shocking killing, depicted at the conclusion of a lengthy video, is the skill with which the Islamist terror group presented and framed the event.  FOX News did the country a service by posting the full video (linked by AT a few days ago) because viewing the propaganda in its entirety demonstrates ISIS’s craftiness, which will no doubt bring further legions of Muslim fan-boys from around the world into their service. 

It is not a terror film or a snuff film. It is a visually-oriented trial of a Muslim apostate. It doesn’t require knowledge of Arabic to understand.  Like the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff in France, the killing of Lieutenant Moaz al-Kassasbeh was an execution under sharia law, at least as interpreted by Salafist groups like ISIS. The doomed airman is shown confessing his crimes, sophisticated depictions of the allied air campaign with video-game style graphics punctuate the film with an emphasis on fiery bomb explosions, and ultimately Lieutenant al-Kassasbeh is marched to his place of execution past masked, stylishly uniformed, steely-eyed and well-equipped terrorists, who set the fire and watch him burn. 

For a significant group of young, disaffected, and psychologically malleable Muslim men and women, this video and others like it are undeniably effective recruiting tools. Many young men are easily tempted by promises of adventure, risk, violence, sex, and finally, justice.  ISIS offers it all, at least in theory, and videos like the execution of Lieutenant al-Kassasbeh play to those yearnings.    

The film is also structured to justify the killing for the significant minority of Muslims who quietly support Islamism, and to mute protests from those even further removed from the fever swamp of the most radical ideology.  The video clearly, and arguably successfully, presents the execution within the concept of sharia called hisbah in which any Muslim, with or without the consent or imprimatur of higher authority, is duty bound to punish apostates. 

All this is obviously lost on President Obama. While ISIS actively recruits often ignorant young Muslim men and women with promises of religious glory, earthly plunder, and martyrdom, Obama appears fixated by a different ideological blindness, founded upon his boyhood in Indonesia, rigid leftist ideology, and his own callow psychology and ignorance. 

In most Muslim countries sharia guides civil law, and is imposed with institutionalized ruthlessness. In the Middle East all Islamic nations apply sharia except Turkey (though that prohibition is fraying.)  Elsewhere Muslim nations, outside of sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet republics, apply it to one extent or another.  Indonesia, generally regarded as a moderate Muslim state, applies sharia haphazardly, and this was even truer during Obama’s boyhood.   

Obama’s youth in Indonesia was likely free from any meaningful experiences of sharia.  He does not know the reality of Islam as practiced in most of the world. Coupled with his extreme narcissism, a lack of self-awareness, and an upbringing in a leftist intellectual cocoon which depicted Muslims as victims of the West, Obama seems to have idealized Islam in a way that even many Muslims don’t.  Mix in a chronic ignorance of history, and a lack of intellectual curiosity, and you have his remarkable refusal to link Islam to modern-day terrorism. In this, Obama is most certainly not the smartest guy in the room. Indeed, he may be one of the dumbest guys on the planet, with most of 1.6 billion Muslims, and 5.4 billion other people, able to draw a connection that he cannot.  

The boy is the father of the man, and it is not too far a leap to see this in Obama. My own father grew up a Jew in Germany during the 1920s, and despite the menace on the horizon, lived an obliviously happy life there until his family emigrated in 1928 when he was ten. Throughout his life he idealized his German childhood. He didn’t suffer from Obama’s psychological pathologies, nor was he a political ideologue, and so never excused the Germans for their actions before and during World War II (in which he fought as an American naval officer.)  Still, I always found his appreciation of Germany rather incredible.

Trying to understand Obama’s love of Islam, and his tolerance, if not affection, for Islamism, doesn’t excuse either when it interferes with his duties as president, which it surely does. On this basis alone, no American president has ever been so ill suited for office. 

Considering the current threats America faces from violent Islamism, thanks to the Islamic fan-boys that Obama refuses to understand, he appears at the very least psychologically incapable of performing his primary duty of protecting the nation.  But unfortunately it’s worse than that. 

Obama’s incapacity also encompasses a grandiose fantasy whereby he will lead the United States and the West into an alliance with the radical apocalyptic Islamic state of Iran. Again, as with Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the link between modern terror and Islam, almost nobody else in the world other than his top adviser Valerie Jarret -- who spent her early youth in Iran and appears to suffer a similar developmental delusion -- really believes such a thing is possible. As a result, the so-called group of six (P5+1) negotiation with the mullahs in Tehran, has now been reduced to a bilateral negotiation between Iran and a group of one:  Obama and his sycophants, to include the secretary of state and other devil’s bargain functionaries. This gang of psychos and cynics, if allowed to proceed, will ensure Iran becomes a nuclear power, nuclearize and further destabilize the Middle East, and ensure the crippling if not destruction of Israel. 

Viewed in this context, Obama’s juvenile schoolyard fixation and hatred for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu becomes yet more limpid. It also means that Netanyahu’s address to the American Congress cannot come fast enough. And for those Democrats who threaten to heed Obama’s call to boycott the visit, comes the growing realization that they are tying their future, and that of their country, to an Islamist fan-boy at best, a president who is increasingly unhinged from reality at worst.