In a 23 May 2013 speech, President Obama told listeners at National Defense University that Americans should move past the post-9/11 war footing. He then went on to compare the Islamist terror threat to “many forms of violent extremism in our history.” As the WSJ notes, “Few speeches in presidential history have been repudiated so quickly by events.”
President Obama entered the White House believing that the “war on terror” was a misguided overreaction driven by political fear, and his government even stopped using the term. Seven years later Mr. Obama is presiding over a global jihadist revival that now threatens the American homeland more than at any time since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Every instinct of this Administration, starting with the President, has been to minimize the terror risk on U.S. soil—perhaps because it contradicts Mr. Obama’s political belief that all we have to fear is fear of terrorism itself.
Read more from the WSJ here.
Here’s Obama’s full speech:
