This week, when a reporter asked Barack Obama about his avoidance of the use of the term “war on terror” (Obama has deployed the phrase in public only once, according to the Associated Press), our lawyer president suggested that he thought it best to be careful with his words so as not to alienate moderate Muslims.

“Words matter in this situation,” Obama said, “because one of the ways we’re going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds.”

Words do matter.  And Obama has spoken a lot of them in the first couple weeks of his presidency about such things as building “mutual interest and mutual respect” with the Muslim world.  But while Obama’s words are intended to reassure Muslims, his actions may be having the opposite effect on those whose security the president is charged first and foremost with protecting — the American people.

A Gallup poll this week found that Obama’s decision “ordering that the Guantanamo Bay prison be closed” is the second least popular decision he’s made thus far. In fact, a majority of the over 1,000 Americans surveyed by Gallup disapproved of the decision.

That share might have been even lower if Gallup had taken its poll after Wednesday, when Obama told NBC:

Can we guarantee that they’re [Gitmo prisoners] not going to try to participate in another attack?  No.  But what I can guarantee is that if we don’t uphold our Constitution and our values … that will make us less safe. And that will be a recruitment tool for organizations like Al Qaeda.

Once again, the president is demonstrating he has no clue about the nature of America’s jihadist enemy.  We know that many former Gitmo detainees indeed have returned to the global jihad upon their release.  We know that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi was repatriated to Kuwait in 2005 after three years in Gitmo and subsequently acquitted of terrorism charges by a Kuwaiti court.  He went on to kill seven people in a suicide bombing targeting Iraqi security forces in Mosul.

And this week brought news that a much praised “de-radicalization” program for imprisoned jihadists in Saudi Arabia isn’t all it was cracked up to be.  Saudi Arabia had claimed a perfect record in converting murderous jihadists into upstanding citizens.

Now the Saudi government admits that as many as 10 terrorists who completed the program had gone right back to waging jihad.

In a much-discussed interview with Politico this week, former Vice President Dick Cheney pointed out that 61 former Gitmo inmates have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”  And the 200 or so still there are, according to Cheney, “the hard core, whose recidivism rate would be much higher.”

Obama still hasn’t said what he’ll do with the terror suspects at Gitmo once it’s closed.  But the prospect of them housed at the local penitentiary — where, as Chuck Colson has noted, their murderous ideology often becomes viral — helps explain why most Americans don’t want these thugs transferred here.

Obama speaks of the battle to win the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world.  He seems to believe that if America just abided more closely to “our values,” Islamic terrorism would go away.  But “our values” are exactly what our enemy loathes.

While many Muslims simply want peace (proof of which was seen in the successful Iraq elections this week), Obama may find it rather more difficult to win over the Muslims who matter most: those inculcated from birth with the idea that Jews and Christians are sub-human and that death is grander than life.

We have become numb to stories of terrorists who exploit women, children and persons with disabilities by forcing them to become homicide bombers.  But this week, the jihadists put an evil twist on their deplorable acts.  An Iraqi woman is charged with recruiting more than 80 female homicide bombers.  Nothing new there, but get this: the woman, Samira Jassam, confessed to ordering that the girls be raped so that she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.

The heart and mind of an enemy animated more by the prospect of our death than by its own survival cannot be won over by soothing words from the Oval Office.

National security issues probably weren’t foremost on Obama’s mind this week.  Instead, he found himself in the middle of another scandal about one of his cabinet appointees.  When former Sen. Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to become Secretary of Health and Human Services after it was discovered he had cheated on his taxes, Obama admitted, “I think I messed up.  I screwed up.”

I appreciate Obama’s candor.  But I hope the mistakes that have plagued his nomination choices do not presage more screw ups on national security matters.  In his interview with Politico, Cheney warned of a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a nuclear or biological attack in the coming years and said the Obama administration’s policies may make it more likely to succeed.

“Words matter,” and so do actions.  If Obama’s actions lead to the obliteration of a U.S. city, the words “I screwed up” won’t be enough.

Scanning the new White House website can be an exercise in anger management for conservatives. The two dozen items under “The Agenda” section constitute a laundry list of leftwing policy goals and big government initiatives. But I was encouraged to see that our new president seemed to have at least one item prioritized correctly. Under “Homeland Security,” President Obama acknowledges that “[t]he first responsibility of any president is to protect the American people.”

Sadly, in the opening days of his administration, President Obama appears determined to accomplish something much different: to reassure the Muslim world that we no longer have the resolve to protect ourselves.

Last week, he extended new rights to terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay while authorizing the sentencing to death of innocent children around the world through taxpayer-funded abortion.

Things didn’t improve this week. In his first TV interview as president, with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel, Obama made three assertions that provide insight into our new president’s worldview. It’s not very reassuring.

First, President Obama said he felt his “job” was to communicate “to the Muslim world … that the Americans are not your enemy.” Why does the American president feel compelled to reassure Muslims that Americans are not their enemy? It was the United States that was attacked on 9-11 by jihadists acting in the name of Islam. Our response to that cowardly attack was to send our military not to subjugate Muslims but to liberate millions in Iraq and Afghanistan from the rule of tyrants.

Citizens of both countries were able to vote for the first time in their lives. In Afghanistan today, in areas where the U.S. is in control, Muslim girls are permitted to go to school. Where radical Islamists are in control, acid is thrown in the faces of girls who try to go to school, and their classrooms are blown up.

After the 9-11 attack, we went out of our way to ensure that mosques in the United States were safe from any kind of backlash. American politicians visited mosques and prefaced every statement about the attack by reassuring Muslims that America was not at war with a faith but only with its extreme adherents.

Muslims are arguably treated better in America today than they were before Muslim extremists declared war on us. We have Muslim members of Congress, and we go out of our way to accommodate Islamic religious practices. Taxpayer money is spent around the world to renovate mosques, and the U.S. gives billions in humanitarian assistance and foreign military aid to Muslim countries.

One might think Muslims would be the ones trying to reassure us that they are not our enemy. But I have yet to hear one Muslim leader do so. In fact, throughout the Muslim world, Christians and Jews continue to be persecuted. We hear that the U.S. and Israel are to blame for everything from Islamic nations’ lack of economic development to 9-11 itself.

Every day in the Palestinian territories — on television, in movies and in music — there is a steady diet of incitements against Jews, who are routinely compared to apes and monkeys. Palestinian students are taught that Jews use the blood of kidnapped Muslim children in religious ceremonies.

During his interview, President Obama told his Muslim audience that he had another task: “to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.”

Even if the president is right, my first reaction is: So what? Muslims who simply want to enjoy peace and quiet are not the problem. It’s the Muslims who nurture groups like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and countless other murderous fanatics who have become the subject of investigation.

I met with Indian leaders this week to talk about the problem of Islamic terror in the world’s largest democracy. They told me that extremism is a big problem among the 14 percent of their population that’s Muslim, and the situation is deteriorating

Even if only ten percent of the Muslim world supports these murderers, then our enemy numbers 150 million.

Of course, freedom-loving nations cannot rely on the “international community” for help. As Joseph Loconte reports in The Weekly Standard Online, the United Nations General Assembly recently approved a “defamation of religions” resolution complaining that Islam is “frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” The resolution encourages member states to take legal action against “discrimination, intimidation, and acts of violence in the name of religion.” But, as Loconte notes, the resolution names only Islam and Muslims as “targets of defamation… In a breathtaking omission, the U.N. document makes no mention of the appalling levels of persecution against dissenting Muslims and non-Muslim minorities in much of the Arab world.”

President Obama talks about a new kind of foreign policy that emphasizes diplomacy over dictation. But what about the diplomacy of freedom? Like Obama, President Bush routinely reassured Muslims that Americans are not their enemy. But, unlike Obama, he did it by reassuring them that the United States would not abandon them in their struggle for freedom.

Obama also said that America was not born as a colonial power and that he hoped for a restoration of “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” But 30 years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran declared war against the West, a war he initiated by seizing the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and taking American hostages.

Twenty years ago, the U.S. shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra, Hezbollah militants tortured and killed an American Marine, and the Soviet Union finished pulling out of Afghanistan, a move that allowed the Taliban to entrench itself there.

Perhaps our President wants to take us back to a time of American hostages and fundamentalist coups. Or maybe he’s just a very poor student of history. Either way, it’s not very reassuring.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be sworn in as America’s 44th president.  It will be a poignant moment as America’s first black president takes the oath of office facing the Lincoln Memorial and with his hand on the same Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration in 1861.

Much has been made of Obama’s decision to use Abe’s Bible, as well as Obama’s ambition to model his presidency after that of Lincoln, America’s first Republican president and historically one of its most beloved.

I hope President Obama succeeds, and in two ways in particular.  I hope Obama follows Lincoln’s example in steadfastly fighting a difficult but winnable war.  And I hope Obama emulates Lincoln in recognizing that all America’s citizens are entitled to the constitutional right to life.

During the Civil War, President Lincoln made many decisions that were criticized harshly by the press, Democrats and even the U.S. Supreme Court as affronts to civil liberties.  Shortly after the war started, Lincoln declared martial law and authorized military tribunals.  He unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, the constitutional right to appear before a judge before being imprisoned.  Overall, as many as 15,000 people were arrested without a prompt trial.

Lincoln also increased the size of the Army and Navy, hiked military spending and instituted a blockade, all without congressional approval.

Lincoln wasn’t the only president to take bold and prompt action in a time of war.  Consider the other president Obama hopes to emulate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  FDR authorized the FBI to investigate suspected fascists and communists in America.  And in 1940 he signed the Smith Act into law, which required resident aliens to register with the federal government.  Roosevelt also signed executive order 9066, which authorized the relocation of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry to protect military bases and manufacturing plants from possible sabotage.  Two thirds of those relocated were American citizens.  We now recognize that this was a human rights mistake, but at least everyone understood that Roosevelt was putting national security first.

When it was discovered that eight Nazis had made their way to the U.S. to blow up power plants in 1942, all eight were captured, tried and convicted by a military court.  Two of the men received 30-year sentences while the other six were executed by electrocution.  And it was all done within two months of them entering the country.

Like other wartime presidents, President Bush has been criticized by political opponents, scolded by the courts and demonized in the media for real and perceived infringements on personal freedom.  But then again, the Bush Administration’s tactics, such as surveillance of suspected terrorists, helped produce its greatest achievement:  keeping America safe from terrorist attacks in the years since 9-11.

Many Americans doubt whether Obama recognizes that his first job as president is to keep Americans safe from terrorists, not to appease his party’s leftwing base.  Recent events have not been reassuring.  The Obama transition team leaked this week that the president-elect intends to issue an executive order shortly after Inauguration Day ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay.  But Obama has not yet explained what he would do with the over 200 suspected terrorists if GITMO were closed, not to mention other enemy combatants held in military prisons across the world.

Last year, when the liberal majority on the Supreme Court granted certain constitutional rights to foreign terrorists, Justice Antonin Scalia warned, “America is at war with radical Islamists. …today’s opinion … will make the war harder on us.  It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Justice Scalia’s commonsense warning was prophetic.
The Pentagon announced this week that 61 former GITMO prisoners released in recent months have rejoined their holy warrior colleagues on battlefields around the world, where they are doing their very best to kill our sons and daughters serving in the U.S. military.  While presidents must walk a fine line between protecting civil liberties and safeguarding our nation’s citizens, in times of war and crisis, the nation needs a strong chief executive.

Obama should also emulate Lincoln in the 16th president’s recognition of the value of all human life.  Abraham Lincoln was elected president four years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous Dred Scott decision, which affirmed slavery and defined slaves as property, not citizens.  Lincoln was a strong, prudent, opponent of slavery and often voiced his concern that Dred Scott would lead to a Supreme Court ban on state abolition of slavery.

Just as slavery was an assault on human dignity, the slaughter of millions of unborn children is an assault on the most basic human right, the right to life.

Obama’s inauguration will take place just two days before the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that claimed to find a constitutional right to destroy the life of an unborn child. Unlike Lincoln, Barack Obama does not believe in the right to life and citizenship for all Americans.  Obama’s pro-abortion record is well known.  He has promised that the first thing he’ll do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a law that would overturn the few existing state and federal restrictions on abortion.  Researchers estimate that FOCA would generate at least 125,000 more abortions a year in a nation already devastated by 4,000 a day.

With its Roe decision, the court again wrongly declared that some Americans are not entitled to the constitutional right to life and that they can be destroyed at the discretion of others.  Sadly, that evil philosophy of death will be given new life under President Obama, unless he embraces Lincoln in affirming the equality of all human life.

Barack Obama has indicated he will look to Abraham Lincoln as a role model for principled leadership in a time of war and instability.   Let’s hope he has the audacity to do just that.