To: longnshort who wrote (711556 ) 4/24/2013 5:22:00 AM From: Taro 3 Recommendations Read Replies (2) | Respond to Fighting thugs with hugs Last Updated: 8:52 AM, April 21, 2013 Posted: 12:05 AM, April 21, 2013 After the capture of the second Boston bombing suspect, President Obama gave a Friday-night speech to praise private citizens and law-enforcement officials. He called the bombers “terrorists” and said, “They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated. They failed because, as Americans, we refused to be terrorized.” Good, strong stuff — before he ruined it. Obama’s uplifting tone suddenly shifted into peevish scold as he warned against a rush to judgment “about the motivations of these individuals” or “entire groups of people.” He continued: “One of the things that makes America the greatest nation on Earth . . . is that we welcome people from all around the world — people of every faith, every ethnicity, from every corner of the globe. So as we continue to learn more about why and how this tragedy happened, let’s make sure that we sustain that spirit.” My immediate reaction was loud and unprintable. Reading the transcript in the light of day didn’t help. To put it kindly, the president is stuck in deep denial. Shadow-boxing against the truth, he can’t bring himself to say “Muslim terrorists.” To do so would, in his mind, feed a stereotype and fuel innate American prejudice. So reality must be avoided and important facts omitted about the extraordinary events in Boston. Liberal pieties dictate that the praise for American resilience is mere prelude to a warning against our lesser angel. The scolding diminished a moment of national pride by suggesting that Islam played no role in the worst terror attack on American civilians since 9/11. Those who think Islam matters are regarded as bigots. Obama’s not fooling anybody except himself. The ties between terrorism and radical Islam won’t disappear because he refuses to see them. The speech was another missed opportunity for straight talk that is not nearly as toxic as the president imagines. He could easily acknowledge the bombers’ drift to radicalization while still cautioning against stereotypes. He could say they apparently were motivated by jihadists while stressing that not all Muslims are terrorists. That simple truth, obvious and balanced, is embraced by the overwhelming majority of Americans. By denying it, Obama insults them and discredits himself. More disturbing is that his Friday speech perfectly captures his worldview, part of which subscribes to the myth that America is fundamentally anti-Islam. The view surfaces in his apology tours abroad and his contempt for those who don’t share his faith in value-free multiculturalism. His support for building a mosque near Ground Zero rested on the distorted claim that opposition would undermine “our commitment to religious freedom.” His view also informs his policies, including his determination to close Gitmo and release all combatants we capture on foreign battlefields without interrogation. He initially blamed the terror attack that killed our ambassador in Libya on a supposed protest against an anti-Muslim video that never existed. His demand that Israel make endless concessions to the Palestinians reflects his refusal to recognize broad Muslim anti-Semitism. Stubbornness is no virtue when it is based on a closed mind. And while there is much we don’t know about the Boston bombers, we already know they held a twisted view of America shared by many terrorists. The brothers Tsarnaev, along with their mother, reportedly called 9/11 “an inside job” concocted to fuel hatred of Muslims. That this generous nation gave them asylum, freedom and welfare made no difference. The family’s journey from gratitude to hatred would be a remarkable story if we hadn’t seen it before. But we have, and the warning about radical Islam’s appeal in the West has been sounded repeatedly, most eloquently by Tony Blair. “The problem is not simply the extremism. And I think one of the mistakes is in thinking that if you deal with the extremists, you deal with the problem,” the former British prime minister said in a TV interview in 2010. Blair argues that global jihad is more complicated than most Westerners believe, and that the terrorists’ narrative is not limited to those who take up arms. The heart of the jihad myth, he said, is “that Islam is under oppression from the West, that the West is hostile, and that by the leadership of Muslim countries being in alliance with the West, they are somehow complicit in a betrayal of the fundamentals of their religion.” Blair added, “That is a narrative that has a broader reach than we think.” He cited as examples young men educated in the West who became radicalized and plotted to blow up airliners, trains and buildings in New York and London. He warned that the phenomenon is growing. We can now add to the roster of homegrown terrorists a pair of ethnic Chechens who, as their lives in America unraveled, turned to radical Islam, and then turned against their adopted homeland. These are facts, and even the man in the Oval Office can’t make them go away.
