Obama's ignorance of terrorist motivations
Michelle Malkin:
IN all the brouhaha over the New Yorker's cover cartoon satirizing Barack and Michelle Obama, a truly "tasteless and offensive" passage in the magazine's feature article got lost.
The piece quotes Obama's recommendations for how to stop jihad, which he had previously published in a local Chicago newspaper eight days after 9/11. It's a self-parody of blind, deaf and dumb Kumbaya liberalism:
"We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.
"Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."
Is this man for real? Osama bin Laden's murderous legions are plenty able to "imagine" the "suffering of others." Go watch an al Qaeda beheading video. Just Google it or surf YouTube. Imagining the suffering of infidels is covered amply in basic Jihadi Training 101.
You'll note, too, that Obama's fresh instinct in the week after the 9/11 attack was to diagnose it as a "tragedy" stemming from lack of "empathy" and "understanding" - instead of as the deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged Islamic war on the West that it was.
Then there's Obama's continued delusion about the "climate of poverty and ignorance" that supposedly breeds Muslim terrorists. Can American politicians ever rid themselves of this unreality-based trope? The same idiocy leads the State Department to embrace "spa days" for Muslims to "build bridges" with the Arab world and President Bush to open up our aviation schools to more Saudi students to "improve understanding."
...
It is not lack of education or opportunity that motivates terrorist. Most of the worst of them are the most educated and well off. The driving force behind terrorism is religious bigotry. Islamic religious bigots are responsible for terrorism and they are motivated by their bigotry. Liberals need to get out of their liberal skins and look at the world as it is and not as they think it is. There is probably not one person in Haiti with the wealth and opportunities bin Laden had, but not one of them has since others off to explode and practice mass murder.
While it is true that most mass murders have an empathy deficit that is a by product of the driving force behind their actions. In the case of Islamic terrorist that driving force is their religious bigotry and it is not limited to non Muslims. It also motivates their murder of non combatant Muslims who they deem not sufficiently Muslim.
Posted by Merv
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