Honest discussion of the truth, not a moment too soon. My latest in PJ Media:

President Trump first said it during his inaugural address:

We will … unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.

The establishment media has been too involved with comparing crowd sizes to take any significant notice, but Trump’s words heralded a change that was momentous — and could make all the difference in our civilizational struggle against the global jihad.

One principal reason why the threat of Islamic jihad that confronts Trump is so large is because his predecessor ignored it, denied its motivating ideology, and allowed it to proliferate. A pivotal yet overlooked action of the Obama administration was its purge of all mention of Islam and jihad from law enforcement counter-terror training materials in 2011 to heed the demand of U.S. Muslim groups and their allies. Since then, the U.S. has failed to identify, confront, and oppose the ideology that has enabled jihadis to behave more boldly and aggressively then ever.

That ideology has spread unchecked in the U.S. in large part because Barack Obama didn’t want law enforcement officials learning about it: that would have been “Islamophobic.”

It is an adage as old as warfare itself: one cannot defeat an enemy that one does not understand. It could be added that one certainly has no chance whatsoever of defeating an enemy that one refuses to understand. Yet Obama’s “Countering Violent Extremism” program pointedly and ostentatiously avoided all mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism. He did this in accord with the claim that investigating and speaking honestly about the beliefs and goals of jihadis would so mortally offend moderate Muslims that they would become “radicalized” and join the jihad themselves.

The whole construct was absurd. Those who advanced the claim, and they were many, never explained why these “moderates” who supposedly rejected violence in the name of Islam as “un-Islamic” would be so enraged by discussion of how others committed violence in the name of Islam that they would be moved to … violence in the name of Islam.

But now the Absurd Administration is gone. A new age of realism is dawning.

Trump has vowed to “eradicate” what he calls “radical Islamic terrorism” “completely from the face of the Earth.” He reiterated this the day after his inauguration, when speaking to the CIA: