Or with words, or with anything, apparently.
July 9, 2015
President Barack Obama addresses reporters at the Pentagon, July 6, 2015, after meeting with Defense Secretary Ash Carter, left. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, stands at right. DoD photo by Glenn Fawcett
Speaking at the Pentagon on Monday, Barack Obama once again proclaimed that victory over the Islamic State was just around the corner. He said that the Islamic State’s “recent losses in both Syria and Iraq prove that ISIL can and will be defeated. The more he talked, however, the more it became clear that he not only had no plan to defeat the Islamic State, but was sketching out a pathway to surrender.
“Ideologies,” Obama declared, “are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision.”
Ideologies are not defeated by guns? Really? Yet if National Socialism and Shinto militarism were not defeated by guns, what defeated them? Any serious and thoroughgoing effort to refute them as ideologies came after the guns had stopped firing, during the occupation of Germany and Japan, when the Allies worked to turn the hearts of the citizenry away from the beliefs in which they had been relentlessly indoctrinated for years.
What’s more, the United States is not trying to defeat the Islamic State, or the global jihad in general, with “a more attractive and more compelling vision.” Instead, we supervised the installations of constitutions that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Imposing Sharia is the goal of all jihad groups, including the Islamic State. The United States has never stood in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else, for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, equality of rights for women, etc. — all of which are denied in Sharia. In other words, we didn’t counter their ideas with a more attractive and compelling vision. We didn’t counter them at all, and still aren’t doing so, because to do so would be considered “Islamophobic.”
How is Obama going to counter their ideology when he won’t even acknowledge what it is? Three years ago, his administration banned the truth about Islam and jihad from counterterror training, bowing to the demands of Muslim, Arab and Pakistani organizations that wrote to John Brennan claiming that FBI and other agents were being imbued with “Islamophobia.” Since then, Obama, Brennan, John Kerry, Joe Biden and other Administration spokesmen have steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Islamic jihad has anything to do with Islam whatsoever – thus foreclosing upon any possibility that the United States will confront the jihad ideology in any serious or effective manner.
Obama doubled down on this willful ignorance when he said: “Our efforts to counter violent extremism must not target any one community because of their faith or background – including patriotic Muslim Americans who are keeping our country safe,” he said.
If he was referring to attacks on innocent Muslims, of course, no innocent Muslims should suffer any harm or injustice. He seemed to be saying more than that. The idea that it is wrong to fight Islamic jihad by paying attention to Muslim communities more than Baptist or Jewish or Hindu or Amish communities is absurd. Islamic jihad is committed by Muslims. Obama won’t even call it Islamic jihad or admit that it is a specifically Muslim phenomenon, and insofar as he diverts any resources to tracking “right-wing extremism” on the basis of bogus studies, he makes us all less safe.
Obama claimed at the Pentagon that the U.S. and its allies would ultimately defeat and destroy the Islamic State. But he said that couldn’t be done with guns, and as he consistently ignores and denies the ideology behind the Islamic State, he won’t do it with words. So what he was essentially saying was that he wasn’t going to fight the Islamic State at all. What he gave us at the Pentagon on Monday was the confident address of a victorious Commander-in-Chief only in the eyes of the most besotted mainstream media sycophants. All he really had to offer was a game plan for surrender.
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