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发帖数: 6571 | 1 The Dream Of Muslim Outreach Has Become A Nightmare
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 U
.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.
But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse
than the original illness.
Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he
has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America's strained relations
with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive
predecessor, George W. Bush.
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.
Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word "terrorism,"
was airbrushed from the new administration's vocabulary. Words to describe
terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms
like "overseas contingency operations," "man-caused disaster" and "workplace
violence."
In apology tours and mythological speeches, 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 Obama's outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and
weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated.
Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or
generic "violent extremism."
Careerist toadies in government parroted the party-line message and even
tried to outdo their politically correct boss.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano focused on returning
veterans as terrorist risks. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said
that global warming, not the Islamic State, was the real threat. NASA
Administrator Charles Bolden said the president asked him to make Muslim
outreach a top priority for the agency. CIA Director John Brennan said that
jihad "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam." Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper opined that the Muslim Brotherhood was
largely secular.
The president often blamed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for
needlessly provoking Islam. Obama said that terrorist dangers were no more
deadly than falls in bathtubs. He wrote off the Islamic State as an inept
jayvee squad, assuring that they posed no existential threat. He campaigned
on the premise that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama pulled all troops out of
Iraq, which instantly degenerated into chaos.
Obama kept insisting that guns, not Islamic terrorists, were the real danger
-- even as assassins used bombs from Boston to Paris, knives from
California to Oklahoma, and, most recently, a truck to run over innocents in
Nice, France.
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more
about charges of "Islamophobia" than preempting deadly terrorist attacks.
Authorities had either interviewed and then ignored the Boston, Fort Hood,
San Bernardino and Orlando terrorists, or they had blindly ignored their
brazen social media threats.
There was never cause for such weak-horse contrition.
Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and
Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants -- even as Christians were
persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.
Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.
S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of
Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets
and later from the Taliban.
For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil -- even
as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil
profits for Gulf state monarchies.
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida,
were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written
diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael
Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America's lack of campaign
finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.
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, just as in the mythical glory days of the caliphate.
In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy,
statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty,
economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America
progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on
affluent Western nations and on Israel.
More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe
and the United States -- but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and
show ingratitude once they got there.
In short, the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare --
and it is not over yet.
http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2016/07/21/the-dream-of-muslim-outreach-has-become-a-nightmare-n2195252 |
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