OPINION:
President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lack the moral clarity to say the U.S. is at war with radical Islamic terror.
After last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared: “We are at war — not a war against a religion, not a war against a civilization, but to defend our values, which are universal. It’s a war against terrorism and radical Islamism, against everything that would break our solidarity, our liberty, our fraternity.”
And the threat is real.
Between 2010 and 2013 — under the Obama administration — the number of jihadis worldwide doubled to 10,000 while the number of jihadis groups spiked by 58 percent, according to a Rand Corp. study. That was before the rise of the Islamic State. Today, the U.S. government estimates the terror organization has 25,000 fighters at its disposal.
After 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 innocent people — declaring his allegiance to the Islamic State in a 911 call — Mr. Obama refused to acknowledge the killer’s allegiance to radical Muslim ideology, rather calling the shooting an “act of terror.” He then took a veiled shot at Christians and their anti-gay stances, all the while declaring the need for more gun control.
So, let’s get this straight: a heavily-armed Muslim man of Afghan heritage committed the worse mass shooting in U.S. history, and Mr. Obama blames guns and Christians?
“Regardless of the particular motivations of this killer, there are connections between this vicious, bankrupt ideology and general attitudes towards gays and lesbians, and unfortunately that is — that’s something that the LGBT community is subject to, not just by [the Islamic State], but by a lot of groups that purport to speak on behalf of God around the world,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Obama is trying to seek a moral equivalency where there is none.
Christians may not want their little girls to share bathrooms with grown men, but they certainly are not out killing gays and transgenders on behalf of their God.
Chick-fil-a, a fast food chain that the left tried to boycott after its owners said they didn’t support gay marriage, opened its doors Sunday — when it’s normally closed — to make sandwiches for those donating blood to the victims of the shooting.
My Southern Baptist pastor, who wouldn’t perform a marriage between two women because of his beliefs, sent out a compassionate newsletter to our congregation after the shooting, citing John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
“No man is an island, entire of itself. Everyone is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. …Therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” the pastor wrote, quoting Donne.
This is the face of Christianity, to have love and compassion for every man, for we’re all the children of God, and can only be redeemed through him.
Radical jihadis don’t share these beliefs — any of them. And trying to equivocate the two is part of the reason we’re failing in this war on terror.
“There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State,” Graeme Wood wrote in an article for the Atlantic, “What ISIS really wants.” “In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
“Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do,” Mr. Wood wrote. “But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”
During a debate in November, Mrs. Clinton challenged CBS moderator John Dickerson’s premise that the U.S. was at war with radical Islam.
“I don’t think we’re at war with Islam. I don’t think we’re at war with all Muslims. I think we’re at war with jihadists.” she said. “You can talk about Islamists who clearly are also jihadists.”
She then urged outreach to Muslim countries, many of whom recognize and are fighting a war with radical Islamic groups within their own countries.
Yesterday, after what only could be attributed to polling data, Mrs. Clinton finally said the words “radical Islam.” But she also added those trying to push the use of it are trying to “demonize and demagogue and declare war on an entire religion.”
Mrs. Clinton would rather lecture Americans for their anti-Muslim bias than acknowledge the real cancer in the world — radicalized Islamic terror — that we should be united in war against.
Again, the moral clarity of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama is just unclear. They seem to be more comfortable in attacking the Christian right and Republicans in general than they are waging the real war against terrorism.
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