Well, he certainly had a strategy for the speech he gave last night. Like an entertainer who opens his act with his biggest number, Obama’s strategy was to open his speech with the most blatant, brazen, bald-faced lie imaginable.

Over the past several weeks, there’s been a plethora of discussion over Obama’s “strategy” vis-à-vis ISIS (aka ISIL), whether he actually had a strategy and, if so, what it might be.

It had me livid within the first few minutes of his speech, when he had the colossal gall to state, “First of all, ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents.”

“Really?” I found myself yelling at the radio. “What other planet are you on? What other universe or dimension do you inhabit? Have you ever read the ‘most holy Koran’?”

Please! Enough of this “religion of peace” malarkey already!

(This is a drastically cleaned-up version of what I found myself yelling at the radio; I found myself using a great number of intensifying gerunds as my blood pressure soared sky-high.)

It is precisely the fact that the Koran not only condones the killing of innocents but encourages it, Nay, demands it, that distinguishes Islam from all the other religions of the world, and reveals it as something other than a religion; it exposes Islam as a socio-political construct masquerading as a religion.

Surah 9:29 of the Koran, for instance:

"Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled."

As the Investigative Project on Terrorism points out, ISIS is devoutly following this Koranic injunction:

Christians have become subject to the jizyah, or poll tax, since IS seized Raqqa in Syria earlier this year and Mosul in Iraq earlier this summer. Those subject to the jizyah face death if they refuse to pay or convert to Islam. IS similarly cited the Islamic law book known as "Reliance of the Traveler" to justify killing Yazidis and requiring them to convert to its brand of Islam to be spared.

Even the phrase “the killing of innocents” doesn’t adequately reflect the mindset of Islam’s “holy book”. Islam’s quest for world domination by force is driven by the wholesale slaughter of innocents. It informs its adherents that Allah smiles on the wholesale slaughter of innocents, and that the more innocents sent to their doom, the more favor Muslims will curry with their “god”.

Of course, by Islamic “logic”, there are no “innocents”; they are all guilty, guilty of being “infidels”, and they are worthy only of conversion, enslavement, dhimmitude or death, with death being the preferred outcome (and usually delivered in the most violent, barbaric, bloodthirsty, gory, inhuman and diabolical means imaginable).

The fact that fellow Muslims are enslaved, mutilated and slain with the very same demonic glee proves nothing; even those slain (presumably for not being “Muslim enough”) held in their heart of hearts the same view of “the infidel”.

This is the very core of Islam; not “radical Islam”, not “fundamentalist Islam”, but Islam per se. It’s not a “perversion” of Islam; it’s not Islam that has been “hijacked”; it is intrinsic to Islam, and always has been.

Anyone who says otherwise is simply not paying attention, is willfully turning a blind eye to the obvious, or is complicit in furthering Islam’s murderous agenda. It certainly indicates a total ignorance of Islam’s history, which chronicles Islam’s mission of world domination by force that has been an integral part of this so-called “religion” since its very inception.

It really didn’t matter to me what other lies Obama perpetrated in the remainder of his speech (I’ll leave it to others to deconstruct and expose his other falsehoods, like his doubletalk about Syria); I might have even said to myself, “At this point, what difference does it make?”

Obama must have figured (and perhaps rightly so, given the already dumbed-down state of so much of the American populace, thanks in part to a half-century of relentless propaganda and undermining of the educational system) that if the people would swallow that first shameless, unabashed lie, they’d swallow anything. Sadly, and tragically for our once-great nation, I fear that he was right.