The man apparently can't help it--whenever President Barack Obama tries to talk about (or, conversely, avoid talking about) Islam and terrorism, he makes a fool of himself.
First was his adamant refusal to use the term "Islamic terrorism" to describe what everyone knows are acts of Islamic terrorism, or to even allow the words "Islam" and "terrorism" in rhetorical proximity to each other.
To hear Obama and his spokesmen stumble over themselves trying to pretend that ISIS, al-Qaida and the rest of their barbaric ilk have nothing to do with Islam is to squirm with embarrassment for our commander-in-chief. It's as if he believes that if we just close our eyes, plug up our ears and stick our heads in the sand, the whole Islamic-terrorism connection will simply go away; that we won't notice what the "I" in ISIS stands for or hear any of those "Allahu Akbar" chants. That semantics can somehow obscure realities.
Second was his confident assertion, in service of that nonsensical claim that Islamic terrorist organizations aren't really Islamic, that 99.9 percent (!!) of the world's 1.7 billion Muslims reject all that ISIS and Boko Haram stand for. They can't really be Muslim because Muslims simply don't behave that way, at no place, no time, for any reason.
Alas, if Obama were correct in his rather astounding claim featuring that rather astounding number (are there, by the way, any beliefs that 99.9 percent of any given population firmly reject, even that the world is flat?) we could all take comfort and go on to other, more pressing matters. The Arkansas National Guard by itself would be sufficient to give chase and apprehend the miscreants.
But we know, of course, that whatever the actual number in percentage terms happens to be, a great deal more than 0.1 percent of the Muslim world buys at least some of what ISIS and company are selling, otherwise they wouldn't control a region overlapping Iraq and Syria roughly equivalent in size to California, with more gains likely on the way. To pretend, again, that radical Islamist views are entirely bereft of popular support among Muslims is to beg the question of what all the fuss is about.
Finally, there was the insulting and patronizing injunction at the National Prayer Breakfast, following the latest round of Islamist savagery, that we should get off our "high horse" when it comes to issuing condemnations because terrible things were once done in the name of Christianity too, as if the bad things that medieval Christians did 900 years ago have any relation whatsoever to the bad things that radical Muslims are doing now.
The point Obama was trying to make--that evil has been done in the name of every religion--didn't have to be made. We are not obtuse about such matters and don't need a sermon from our condescending theologian in chief featuring false moral equivalencies or admissions of our own sins (or, more precisely, those of our ancestors) in order to condemn the slaughter of children and the burning and beheading of captives. A simple bit of unvarnished, heartfelt outrage would have sufficed. But this is, apparently, never possible with Obama, who always feels compelled to issue caveats and qualifiers. Those who seek to kill us always get cut a little leeway in his nuanced worldview.
But terrorism isn't about semantics, and Obama isn't fooling anyone, in the Muslim world or anywhere else. Rather, all he is doing is earning the skepticism of our friends and the utter contempt of our enemies, who know quite well who they and we are.
We all know that Islam currently has problems, terrorism being only the most conspicuous among them. And if Islam is truly the "religion of peace" that Obama claims it is, then the first people who should be willing to admit this are the world's peaceful Muslims; they are not, after all, little children who need to be absolved from on high for the ugly behavior of some of their co-religionists.
The White House should not seek to serve as the public relations office for the Islamic world. And it isn't our president's job to give us lectures about how the evil deeds some Christians committed many centuries ago should influence how we perceive the evil deeds done in the name of Islam now.
As Obama ties himself into knots trying to avoid acknowledging the obvious, he also only ends up unintentionally confirming it. One cannot, after all, downplay the barbaric acts committed at present by Muslims by comparing them to the barbaric acts committed in the past by Christians without admitting that ISIS and al-Qaida are just as Islamic as the Crusaders and the Spanish Inquisitors were Christian. Put differently, Obama cannot have it both ways--what ISIS and al-Qaida are doing can't be delinked from Islam on the one hand and also be analogous to the misdeeds of Christianity on the other.
In all of this, perhaps the best comment came from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, when he noted that, "The medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the radical Islamic threat today."
At the risk of invoking evil Christianity, Amen.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 02/16/2015