OPINION:
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton avoided using the word “Christians” while commenting on Twitter about the horrific attacks on — yes, let’s call it what it is, please — Christians on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka that left hundreds dead and injured.
Instead, the ex-prez and former secretary of state called the victims “Easter worshippers.”
That’s not just strange and unnatural. It’s a political calculation.
Here’s what Obama tweeted: “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity. On a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal, we pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.”
And Clinton wrote this: “On this holy weekend for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence. I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travelers in Sri Lanka.”
My gosh, people. It was an attack on Christians. It was an attack on Christianity.
The attack consisted of eight bombs at churches and hotels. More bombs exploded in a van parked outside a church on Monday, as well. More “Easter worshippers?” Also on Monday, Sri Lanka’s government, after arresting dozens in connections with the attacks, identified the bombers as National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a radical Islamic group that reportedly carried out the terror attacks in conjunction with “an international network,” The New York Times reported, citing a Sri Lanka official.
But even before the suspect identification, security officials in the country had warned — for 10 days — that the group had set churches in its sights.
Churches, the place where Christians congregate to worship.
Calling them “Easter worshippers” is a political ploy designed to tamp down realities of radical Islamic terror targeting of Christians and Christianity.
But this is what those of the far left do. This is how Muslim apologists roll.
Obama while president, while responding to acts of terror that occurred during his time in public office, never could point the finger of blame toward radical Islamism, even as the rest of the world was screaming radical Islamism — even while the radical Islamics themselves were busily screaming, with bravado and boasting, about their own murderous plots and deeds.
“Obama cites the history of Christian terrorism (and creates an uproar),” National Catholic Reporter wrote in February of 2015, in a story about the speech Obama delivered at the National Prayer Breakfast.
Among his remarks?
“Humanity,” Obama said at this 2015 breakfast, “has been grappling with these questions [of terrorism] throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
He has a history of saying similarly.
“Obama: ’We’ are to blame, not Islamic terrorism, for massacre,” the New York Post reported in June 2016.
“President Barack Obama: Why I won’t say ’Islamic terrorism,’ ” CNN reported, in September 2016.
Truly, as Sen. Ted Cruz, on the heels of the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Egypt and the burning of 45 people in Iraq, laid it out on Fox News: Obama’s “an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.”
His tweet on Sri Lanka underscores.
Clinton, for her part, has a checkered past when it comes to calling a radical Islamic spade a spade.
In 2016, while facing Donald Trump in a run for the White House — while defending herself against Trump’s claims that she wouldn’t call out radical Islamic terrorists by name — Clinton told CNN that “I’m happy to say either … radical jihadism or radical Islamism.”
Yet that wasn’t her stance so much during her Obama administration days.
“When terrorists are revealed as part of the second front of the radical Islamic terror war, Obama and Clinton call them ’lone wolves’ and describe their actions as crimes rather than acts of terror,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani wrote in a September 2016 piece for USA Today.
It’s a game of words that can lead to deadly consequences. Why? For the simple reason that if you can’t name your enemy, you can’t fight your enemy — you can’t win against your enemy.
Thank goodness the squishy days of Obama and Clinton leadership have ended.
At least their recent tweets of anti-Christian bent and baffling draw of religious and moral equivalencies where none exist — insulting as they are — no longer represent U.S. military, diplomatic and political policies. At least America is now safe from those delusions.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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