A comment made by one of President Obama’s closest aides explains his blasé attitude toward the lives of Americans. In late 2012, Neera Tanden, who had been one of President Obama’s closest aides, observed:

Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.

Barack Obama had been warned that leaving Iraq without a residual American force could lead to genocide. When questioned about this risk, he complacently answered that preventing genocide was not a good enough reason to have troops in Iraq .

Barack Obama’s coldness towards Americans -- and others, for that matter -- was obvious before 2012.

Barack Obama has long had an Empathy Deficit, as I wrote in 2010. He easily and coldly boasted he would destroy the coal industry and kill thousands of jobs with the aplomb of Chairman Mao and Josef Stalin reengineering their societies. The jobs that were promised after passage of the trillion-dollar stimulus plan never materialized because as Barack Obama jocularly put it two years later “shovel-ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.”  When Texas was hit with devastating forest fires, Obama was cracking jokes at a California fundraiser, “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”  He has articulated his contempt for so called everyday Americans many times (see my 2012 column, What Obama Thinks of Americans  and my 2014 column, Obama Thinks You Are Stupid, That’s Why)

Barack Obama seems particularly complacent when it comes to Americans endangered and murdered by Islamic extremists.

Here are some examples (with more undoubtedly to come as President Obama oversees a massive influx of Muslims into America, hence fulfilling his promise to “fundamentally transform America”). Obama’s Syrian asylum policy continues apace, despite the role of at least one Syrian “refugee” in the massacres in Paris. Obama wants to welcome at least 10,000 more Syrians into America (Hillary wants 65,000). What could go wrong? Ben Rhodes, Obama’s chief liar now that Susan Rice has outlived her usefulness in that role, appeared on numerous broadcasts to assure us these “asylum seekers” will be thoroughly vetted to eliminate security risks -- contradicting the widely respected FBI chief, James Comey, who testified before Congress that vetting Syrian “refugees” will be challenging. Can’t we trust the competency of an administration who can handle the IRS, the VA, the stimulus program, green energy projects, and security of government employee records so well?

When Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered by Islamic terrorists the best that Barack Obama could offer was that his “loss” had “captured the imagination of the world.”  Captured the imagination? Mark Steyn had some choice words for Obama’s lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl. There was no indignation or rage.

First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none. (snip)

Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that captured the world's imagination."

After Barack Obama announced that American journalist James Foley had been beheaded by Islamic extremists he raced off to the links to yuck it up with NBA star Alanzo Mourning  and others.

George Bush gave up golf as president because he felt it unseemly for a commander-in-chief to be playing golf while Americans were serving overseas in the military. Clearly Obama has different seemliness standards (see his interview with the YouTube comedian GloZell who bathes in milk and cereal in a bathtub).

When Americans were killed in Benghazi the White House refused to give an honest accounting of who murdered them (it was an offshoot of Al Qaeda). Their deaths were, in Obama’s cold phrasing, were not “optimal.”   Well, they certainly weren’t optimal for him and his re-election campaign, so he and his Praetorian guard lied about their murders. Who got the blame? An obscure Coptic Christian who had directed an equally obscure video that may have riled some Muslims -- had they seen it (which, basically, no one had). The spin was that Muslims had been (“legitimately”?) enraged by the video that mocked Mohammed. Survivors were lied to and are still awaiting a call from the President to honestly explain why their loved ones had been murdered. They will be waiting a long time.

At times, he seems intent on justifying Islamic terrorism,or at least relativizing such violence by putting it in “historical context.”  Last year, at the National Prayer breakfast (of all places) he invoked the Crusades while talking about Islam and terrorism:

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama noted there was a time when people mass-murdered in the name of Christianity, too:

And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

As many were quick to point out, the Catholic Church's Crusades began more than 900 years ago, and the Inquisition began in the 13th century.

The comparison was absurd but part of a pattern of Obama being an apologist for Islamic terrorism. The violence perpetrated by Muslim terrorist never has anything to do with Islam in the rose-colored view of Barack Obama and his officials and they have all but covered up the role played by Islam in the murder of Americans.

John Kennedy wrote of Winston Churchill “he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”  Barack Obama has thumbed through the thesaurus and mobilized the English language in ways that George Orwell had foreseen -- as a way for regimes to hide the truth from people. In this case, camouflaging an enemy.

The Muslim Brotherhood becomes a “mostly secular” group-this gem from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.   Islamic terrorist attacks become “man-caused disasters.”  The 2009 Fort Hood massacre is described as a case of “workplace violence” despite the murderer, Nidal Hassan, having business cards describing him as a “soldier of Allah.”  When a Chattanooga  Navy recruitment center was attacked by Mohammad Abdulazeez, a Muslim who justified his attack because he was displeased by America’s war on terror (and therefore committed terror), the White House all but ignored the murder of our Navy personnel. Those murders merited almost zero notice. The White House has focused a lot of attention on violence on college campuses but was silent in the wake of the recent stabbing spree by Faisal Mohammed at a California university campus.

One wonders at what point, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, did American lives ever matter to Barack Obama? After all, his moral compass, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., celebrated 9/11 as America’s chickens having come to roost and routinely spouted anti-American diatribes as Barack Obama and his family stayed in the pews (Oprah Winfrey and others quit the church). Israel’s Ambassador to America, Michael Oren, read both of Obama’s books and what struck him the most was that Barack Obama never had one good thing to say about America. Not one.  Is that what they teach at private prep and Ivy League schools or was that an ideology inherited from his parents?

Meanwhile, Barack Obama extolls the role of Islam in America and the world, fabricating history to do so.  He also fabricates in real time, too: erasing the role as much as he can of Islamic radicalism in violence around the world. Indeed, “Islamic radicalism” and “Islamic terrorists” are banished from the lexicon of Obama and all his officials. If one cannot name an enemy it makes it harder to fight them.

Maybe that is the point.

Compare and contrast the treatment meted out to the Cambridge policemen who were merely doing their job when they merely arrested Barack Obama’s friend, Henry Louis Gates Jr., for apparent breaking and entering. From his perch in the White House Obama called the police “stupid” and indicted police nationwide for racism. One can do the same exercise regarding Obama’s complacency when Americans are killed by Muslims to his over the top reaction to the deaths of Trayvon Martin (“if I had a son he would have looked like Trayvon”) and Michael Brown -- both cases cleared the people who shot them as having done so in self-defense, despite the efforts of the federal government to coerce state governments to find otherwise.

 Do some American lives matter more to Barack Obama than others? Given the disparate treatment shown one can speculate so.

Meanwhile, a Texas high-school boy whose feelings were hurt when a teacher confiscated what appeared to be a bomb but what he represented as being a clock he had built (and was probably just a disassembled Radio Shack clock) was acclaimed as  a Muslim Rosa Parks and granted a White House visit. The whole affair now appears to have been a contrived effort by the his activist father to create a cause celebre and another Muslim martyr (though not in the most radical sense, though now that the family has moved to Qatar…that clock making may come in handy).

President Obama has an agenda that is becoming increasingly visible. Marc Thiessen recently wrote in the Washington Post of “Obama’s stubborn, willful complacency on terror”:

Somehow, to paraphrase President Obama, it has become routine — the president dismisses the terrorist threat, only to see terrorists carry out horrific attacks that give lie to his complacency.

On Sept. 6, 2012, Obama boasted at the Democratic National Convention that “al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat.” Five days later, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists attacked two U.S. diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

On Jan. 7, 2014, Obama dismissed the Islamic State as the “JV” team in an interview with the New Yorker, adding that the rise of the Islamic State was not “a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.” That same month, the Islamic State began its march on Iraq, declaring a caliphate, burning people alive in cages and beheading Americans.

Then on Thursday, Obama did it again, telling ABC News, “I don’t think [the Islamic State is] gaining strength” and promising “we have contained them.” The very next day, the Islamic State launched the worst attack on Paris since World War II, killing at least 132 people and wounding more than 350 others.

How many times is this sad spectacle going to repeat itself?

Well, chronologically, for at least one more year. Barack Obama is not interested in pursuing a war against radical Islam -- he doesn’t think there is or should be a “war on terror” (another banished phrase) and seems more intent on burnishing Islam, even if it is at our expense and at the cost of our lives. Neera Tanden was right; he doesn’t like people and couldn’t care less what happens to (most) of us: our lives don’t matter.