Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness?  Ask the huddled masses who are  yearning to be free.  America was once thought of as a light unto nations.  Obama has single-handedly extinguished that light.

I saw it all coming.  In my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America, I noted that one student who was interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe in 2009 said happily: "He sounds just like a European."  That is, not like an American president who loves his country.  And he doesn't: asked during that visit to Europe about American exceptionalism, Obama answered: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

In other words, he didn't believe in American exceptionalism at all.  In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires in May 2008, showing candidate Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria's American epitaph, The Post-American World.  In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn't dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.

The vicious Zakaria describes his book this way: "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."  In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now -- a world in which the United States would "no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures."  He asserts that the "rise of the rest" is the "great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.  The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States.  This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems."

Obama seems bound and determined to drive America over a cliff and make Zakaria's vision of the future a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria's wishful thinking about America's decline a reality.  As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees.  Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world's only remaining superpower.  He turned against our allies (particularly Israel) and showed them that America could not be relied on.  He taxed us into poverty and stirred up racial strife to make us all less safe.  He has enabled Russia to re-emerge as a world power, and the Islamic jihadists are bolder than ever.

Obama vowed to make America just another nation -- unexceptional -- and he has.  It's not that other nations have risen.  They haven't.  It's that Obama has dismantled American hegemony and diminished our standing in the world.

And so, during the Muslim massacre at a Nairobi mall, whom did Kenyan officials call for help?  They called Israel.  Obama is Kenyan, with close relatives in the country.  It is his native land, the country where his father was born.  So you might think he would have sent help, but his father (and stepfather) were Muslim; perhaps that is why he always comes down on the side of the jihad.

Where is the media coverage?  This is Obama's native land -- where is his condemnation of the vicious sharia?  His silence is sanction and support.

And in general, the U.S. is glaringly absent in this worldwide fight for freedom against Islamic jihad killers.  Here is where America should be leading from the front, or the side, but at least from somewhere.  I am ashamed for my country.

Kenya has been a beacon for democracy in Africa.  But Africa has come under the boot of Islam under a post-American U.S. president who is aiding and abetting the global jihad.  Obama aided Islamic supremacists in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria.  And Islamic supremacists have been waging a vicious jihad in Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania...the whole continent.  This is the horror of Islamic supremacism.

Egypt, in a fierce rebuke of Obama and his patronage of the Muslim Brotherhood, on Monday banned the Brotherhood.  Here in America the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated a terrorist organization like Hamas (an MB group), along with its proxies in the U.S. such as CAIR, ISNA, MSA, and MAS.  Despite Egypt's massive rejection of Islamic supremacism, and despite the recent rash of Muslim on non-Muslim attacks, the jihad-aligned media is digging in and whitewashing Islam and jihad, while doing everything they can to make Obama look good.

But despite their best efforts, that task is getting harder and harder.  And the absence of America acting in the defense of freedom across the world is proof that Ayn Rand was right when she said that "the spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum.  Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."

And the Obama presidency is an epic moral failure.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.