The See-No-Evil President - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The See-No-Evil President
by

George W. Bush couldn’t always speak clearly. His successor can rarely see clearly.

The see-no-evil president doesn’t glimpse Islam as the common denominator behind recent ugliness from Libya to Syria to Nigeria and points beyond. The speak-no-evil president dare not name the religion as the inspiration for vile acts but instead maintains that a perversion of the message of the Warrior Prophet motivates them.  

“The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists,” the White House announced in a statement. “We offer our condolences to the families of the victims and our support to the Egyptian government and people as they grieve for their fellow citizens.”

The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of German citizens at Buchenwald. The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of Southerners by the Ku Klux Klan. The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of schoolchildren by Boko Haram.

Obama lies by omission.

He lies by proxy, too. “Well, Jon, there were people other than just Jews who were in that deli,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl about the Paris kosher deli attack that killed four. Earnest earnestly called the attack “random.”

The lapses in clarity appear anything but random. So desperate to equivocate, the president actually cited the North Carolina murder of three Muslims in a parking dispute with a neighborhood crank and online evangelist for atheism as a religiously-motivated terrorist act deserving of mention in the same breath with the Boston Marathon Bombings.

In contrast to his quick characterization of a murderous parking disagreement as an act of religious hatred, Obama cautioned in the wake of the Boston bombings that “people shouldn’t jump to conclusions before they have all the facts.” When we had the relevant answers for the Fort Hood mass shooting, the president warned that “we don’t know all the answers yet.”

We never do when the answers weren’t the ones the president had hoped for. A rigid ideologue unable to win GOP support for his signature domestic program, the president on international matters resists reality as strenuously as he resists Republicans domestically. Events prove inconvenient to the ideology he brought into the White House. Rather than shake off the ideology, he shrugs off events.

One can abandon the “global war on terrorism” language. That doesn’t magically erase the global war waged by terrorists. Obama has tamped down the rhetoric. The Islamic extremists have simultaneously escalated the terrorism.

With jihadists today on the march in Libya, Syria, and even in Europe, the president instead confronts Christian menaces that predate the discovery of the Americas. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he informed during his National Prayer Breakfast speech earlier this month. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Tu quoque.

There’s an Animal House remain-calm-all-is-well quality to the president’s semantics approach to terrorism. Certainly it’s wise not to alienate the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims by equating their religion with terrorism. George W. Bush adopted a similar strategy in his “religion of peace” mantra. But one needn’t equate the sins of Christians and other believers with the atrocities of the jihadists to win over the hearts and minds of Muslims, themselves most-oft victimized by the jihadists. This tactic risks further alienating the Islamic world by legitimizing the professed grievances of the terrorists. It’s also fundamentally dishonest to pretend away the religious backgrounds of the targets of the beheadings in Libya and the massacre at the deli in Paris.

But Obama remains a man wedded to ideas, not realities. Even mass beheadings, public immolations, and workplace assassinations aren’t powerful enough to divorce the president from his intellectual ball and chain.

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