It was fantasy, one sold as fact to the American people on November 21, 2007 by then Presidential candidate Barack Obama during an interview:

Living in Malaysia for a few years when he was young could not possibly have equipped Obama with all he needed to know about Islam to make America safer 30 years later.

The world changes.

It changed dramatically on September 11, 2001 when Islamic terrorists executed a terrorist plot — born during the Clinton administration — by slamming commercial airliners into the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Pennsylvania field.

Osama bin Laden was a very rich man. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was well educated. The 19 hijackers all came from middle to upper middle class families. What drove them to mass murder was their ideology and hatred of all non-Muslims.

Barack Obama did not learn that lesson. On September 19, 2001, he wrote this in the Hyde Park Herald about the 9/11 attacks:

Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

Three year later, in the 2004 preface to his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama added this:

I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder-alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware-is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

President Obama now blames the September 11, 2012 attacks upon our embassies in Libya and Egypt on an obscure video made by a petty criminal in California.

We are not safer.