Obama for the last year: al-Qaeda is a JV group. Obama this month: They're a threat, but still JV.

Andrew McCarthy nails Obama on the president's many lies about al-Qaeda.  (I've put some edited highlights below, but click for his full article.)

For six years Obama has done everything possible to convince you to believe two core things about al-Qaeda:  First, he claims his policies have put an end to the threat from this group.  As he put it, they're "on the run" and "fragmented;" merely "jayvees"--not a threat.

Second, he asserts that any threat these weak, defeated, fragmented groups pose is totally unrelated to Islam.  As he tells it, Islam is intrinsically peaceful.

But reality has a way of confounding liars and those given to wishful thinking as a substitute for reality.   As the fragmented "JV" groups have now taken over huge chunks of Syria and Iraq and executed thousands of disarmed prisoners, the president has apparently been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.”

Instead, contrary to his lies, the JV team is defeating every force it meets.

Obama told Americans that supporting so-called "moderate" Islamic revolutionaries was the path to security and stability.  Hell, he even threatened airstrikes in support of the rebel groups.  The revolutionaries smiled, happily took every weapon and dollar the president sent, and then went right on killing everyone who wasn't part of their group.

Great plan, Barack!

Now, to avoid admitting that his earlier strategy was either utterly stupid or merely incompetent, Team Obama has invented a new group of Islamic...pardon, not at all Islamic--hostiles called the Khorosan Group--which is now the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize..

You say you hadn't heard of the Khorosan group before yesterday?

There's a good reason: it doesn't exist.  It's a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the border region between Pakistan and ​Afghanistan — would sound like an authentic jihadist group.  They knew no reporter would call bullshit on the president.

The “Khorosan Group” is just al-Qaeda.

Team Obama couldn't be seen as going to war against al-Qaeda because the Emperor had repeatedly claimed al-Qaeda was no longer a threat--"on the run"--"JV."  To now be seen as ordering U.S. airstrikes on "al-Qaeda" it would make it hard to avoid the conclusion that his earlier claims were bullshit.

So as administration officials have it, Zawahiri isn't really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains to call “core al-Qaeda.”  Which is different from “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which in turn is distinct from “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (formerly “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” now the “Islamic State” al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly “al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant”).

That al-Qaeda is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” “Boko Haram,” “Ansar al-Sharia,” or the latest entry, “al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.”

Claiming these groups are substantively different enables Team Obama to continue the charade that they're only jayvees, not really jihad.  Not really a threat.

The Muslim belief in Islamic supremacy unites the parts into a whole — a movement rooted in Islamic scripture that overtly seeks to conquer the West.  Naturally the emperor does not want you to see this--or to believe there's a real threat.

The radical Left--and given Obama's known history there can be little doubt he's in that group--believes terrorism is a consequence of American arrogance and aggression.  For Leftists, America has to be the villain.  By contrast, Islam--despite its fundamental pathologies, which we had no role in cultivating, must be the victim, never the cause.  Obama’s Islamist allies--often Democrat activists--constantly scream that the problem isn't Muslim terrorism--never!--but “Islamophobia.”

Because this is such a total distortion of reality, the Left has to do some very heavy lifting to get Americans to believe it.  Since the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the jihadists is not only written in the Koran but also widely shouted by scores of Islamic leaders, the Left has to convince you that it's an illusion.  Thus jihad is carefully re-defined to mean not conquest but "the internal struggle to become a better person.”  All claims of Islamic supremacism in the Koran must be removed from the materials used to train our national-security agents, and any instructor who doesn't go along with this program must be discredited and/or reassigned.

As a vital part of this strategy the global terror network must be atomized into separate, disconnected, unrelated cells whose members are moved to violence simply by local political or territorial disputes.  The Left can't let anyone believe there's any overarching unity or hegemonic ambition.  That way the problem can be dismissed as a one of law-enforcement rather than as a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.

The president has been telling us for years that he handled al-Qaeda by killing bin Laden. He has been telling us for weeks that the ISIS is a regional nuisance that posed no threat to the United States. In recent days, however, reality intruded on this fiction. Suddenly, tens of thousands of terrorists, armed to the teeth, were demolishing American-trained armies, beheading American journalists, and threatening American targets.

Obama doesn't seem the type of man who can ever admit, “I was wrong: It turns out that al-Qaeda is actually on the rise, its Islamic State faction is overwhelming the region, and American interests — perhaps even American territory — are profoundly threatened.” So instead his team invented “the Khorosan Group.”

Meantime the Saudis and Qatar want no trouble with the rest of al-Qaeda, particularly with al-Nusra. After all, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch is tightly allied with the “moderate opposition” that these “moderate” Gulf states have been funding, arming, and training for the jihad against Assad. Oh, and what about those other “moderates” Obama has spent his presidency courting, the Muslim Brotherhood? It turns out they are not only all for al-Qaeda, they even condemn what one of their top sharia leaders, Wagdy Ghoneim, has labeled “the Crusader war against the Islamic State.”

“The Crusaders in America, Europe, and elsewhere are our enemies,” Ghoneim tells Muslims. For good measure he adds, “We shall never forget the terrorism of criminal America, which threw the body of the martyred heroic mujahid, Bin Laden, into the sea.”

But Obama has his story and he’s sticking to it.