Obama dances around reality as ISIS plays the tune
After months of taking flak for his lack of a coherent strategy to combat ISIS, President Obama came up with an answer. Unfortunately, it’s “let’s pretend.”
In a speech to a conference Wednesday as well as an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, our president did set forth an agenda for countering what he insisted on calling “violent extremism.” But his approach puts the top priority on the West acknowledging the terrorists’ conomic and political grievances.
That won’t convince anyone that Obama understands the nature of the threat. Nor will it do much to convince groups like ISIS that he’s serious about defeating them.
By continuing to dance around the reality that Islamism is a dangerous mainstream force within the Arab and Muslim worlds and downplaying the necessity to fight ISIS on the ground, the president once again demonstrated his discomfort in leading a struggle against evil and his unfitness as a war leader.
Obama is right that most Muslims don’t support the terrorists. Muslim communities should be partners with the government in the fight against those who seek to foment terror. The president is also right to echo George W. Bush’s insistence that America is not at war with an entire religion and its billion adherents.
But in a month that will be remembered for the release of murder videos in which ISIS beheaded and burned to death its victims — even as it expanded its reach from Iraq and Syria to Libya, and its sympathizers gunned down journalists and Jews in the streets of Europe — the leader of the free world needed to give us far more than an agenda for better community relations at home.
It starts with his refusal to call Islamist terrorism by its right name. This is no mere matter of semantics but an integral part of the problem.
So long as our government won’t admit that terrorists are killing in the name of a form of Islam that can count on significant support around the world, the president’s talk about the need to address root causes of violence is so much hot air.
The problem isn’t poverty. Nor is it a matter of addressing the “historical grievances” Obama spoke of. Indeed, ISIS and its sympathizers hear those terms as code words for eliminating Israel and resurrecting a long-vanished past of Muslim dominance that was rooted in aggression.
Just as bad, Obama on Wednesday again refused to mention the anti-Semitism that is an essential element of the toxic Islamist mix. This, too, speaks volumes about his inability to address the ugly truth about a worldwide hate movement.
And his failure to mention the targeting of Christians in the Middle East is just as egregious.
It’s all well and good to speak of the need to “lift up people’s lives” in the hope that they’ll reject terror. But by adopting ISIS’s narrative of Western injustice against Islam, the president is playing the game on their turf and ensuring that the United States can’t win.
The “root causes” of Islamist terror are not to be found in a better jobs program, either here or in the Middle East.
No, the cause is a variant of a great faith that tells its followers to slaughter nonbelievers and Muslim opponents. And the remedy is a military effort that will roll back the gains of ISIS that were made possible by the president’s negligence in recent years — an effort that will convince other Muslims that these groups are not the “strong horse” that they defy at their peril.
Anything else is not only a waste of time, it’s a distraction that undermines the need to rally the West and moderate Arabs to fight back.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of Commentary.u
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