The first paragraph of this Time article by Michael Scherer perfectly encapsulates this president’s M/O for the past six years.
The newest front in the American war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) will not take place in the deserts of Syria, Iraq or Libya, but on the covers of the nation’s tabloids and the airwaves of its cable television jabfests. President Obama, with two speeches in as many days, has decided to take the battle to his conservative critics.
Yes, the front in which this president is most willing to actually fight – is not in the Middle East against fanatical, head-bloodthirsty enemies who have declared war against Western civilization – it against in his own country, against his own fellow citizens.. For Marxists like Obama – everything is political – and the “war” against ISIS (such as it is) is an opportunity to for the community organizer to score political points against the GOP – who in Obama’s telling – are playing right into ISIS’s hands by acknowledging that they do in fact represent a virulent strain of Islam. This Obama “truthbomb” has been specially catered for his left-wing media toadies: Republicans are aiding ISIS by peddling this “lie.”
Those who identify the black-clad extremists with their religious roots, the commander-in-chief argued repeatedly, are peddling a “lie” that will drive recruitment by the nation’s enemies and ultimately hurt U.S. interests. “These terrorists are desperate for legitimacy. And all of us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like ISIL somehow represent Islam, because that is a falsehood that embraces the terrorists’ narrative,” he said, using the U.S. government’s preferred acronym for ISIS, which is also known as the Islamic State.
Anyone who has seen the NY Post cover today however, can see how well Obama’s BS is going over (with even the liberal media.)
But he did not stop there. A day after talking about the “debate in the press and among pundits” over terminology, he accused others in the public sphere Thursday of aiding the terrorist cause by highlighting the connection between Islamic teachings and Islamic State’s tactics, which include rape, beheadings, crucifixions and slavery. “That narrative sometimes extends far beyond terrorist organizations,” he continued. “That narrative becomes the foundation upon which terrorists build their ideology and by which they try to justify their violence, and that hurts all of us, including Islam and especially Muslims who are the ones most likely to be killed.”
SEE ALSO:
Andrew McCarthy, NRO: Find the ‘Countering Violent Extremism Summit’ at the Intersection of Islamists and Leftists:
Linking to this again because he does a great job explaining what Obama’s atrocious CVE Summit is all about.
The public is worried about our national security because, after six years of Obama, jihadists have more safe-haven than ever to plot and train for attacks against America, Israel and Western Europe. Obama, however, sees the situation as grist for a large-scale exercise in community-organizing: A summit that gathers “governments, civil society groups, and community leaders from more than 60 nations” to address “the anger that festers when people feel that injustice and corruption leave them no chance of improving their lives.”
By the president’s lights, what causes terrorism is not sharia supremacist ideology, something that is not to be discussed. Instead, “anger” over “legitimate grievances” — that always turn out to be the same grievances the Left grieves over – makes young Muslims vulnerable to “exploitation” by al Qaeda and ISIS.
For their part, Islamists share the Left’s affinity for muscular government that suffocates individual liberty. They are also anxious to gull Westerners into seeing their grievances as driven by wayward American policies rather than sharia principles. That makes an alliance with the Left a good fit – notwithstanding important differences on such matters as abortion and the rights of women and homosexuals (differences that allies can set aside when defeating a common opponent is the higher objective).
CNS News: Administration’s Poverty-Islamic Terrorism Link Has Been Challenged by Studies:
Rather than being driven by lack of economic opportunity, some of the most prominent jihadist terrorists over the past decade have been educated members of their societies, with plentiful opportunities open to them.
“Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease,” a RAND Corporation report commissioned by Secretary of Defense stated in 2009. “Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.”
The report said that “root cause factors” do affect terrorism, but do so “indirectly by contributing to an environment.”
A 2002 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research examining links between poverty/low education and participation in terror found that in the cases of both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian suicide bombers, support for violent activities was higher among those more educated and better off.
Nice Deb 