JAMES TARANTO: ISIS and the ‘Bitter Clingers:’ Why Obama can’t understand the threat.

Amid all this incoherence, there is one point on which Obama has been remarkably consistent. In that 2002 speech, he said: “Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.”

Last Friday, he struck the same theme, though without bad-mouthing our so-called allies: “We have seen, frankly, in this region, economies that don’t work. So you’ve got tons of young people who see no prospect and no hope for the future and are attracted to some of these ideologies.”

Compare these quotes with candidate Obama’s notorious 2008 remark: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” . . .

It bears emphasis that the problem here is not Obama’s conjectural lack of faith or insincerity. It is, rather, his utter incomprehension of religious sentiment. How does one develop a strategy against an enemy one cannot understand?

Obama can’t imagine people worshipping anything bigger than him.