When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the United States liked in the Middle East. Then terrorism would decrease.

But, Mr. Obama’s remedies proved worse than the original illness. The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Mr. Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Mr. Obama’s outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Mr. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic “violent extremism.”

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East. Jihadists try to convince the Arab street that returning to religious fundamentalism and exporting jihad will empower Muslims to recapture lost primacy over a decadent and guilty West.

While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.