Oh Boy: Andy McCarthy Objects To Obama's Characterization of Al Qaeda as "Racist"

I appended a note to Drew's post on this below, stating I looked at this benignly -- benign, but entirely feckless. And the problem for me comes chiefly in Obama's eternal preference for the ineffectual and impotent over the effective and potent.

If it weren't an either/or proposition -- if it were a "both" situation -- I wouldn't mind so much.

Or at least I thought.

Andy McCarthy isn't having that.

Actually, he makes several of the same points Drew does. I guess I should have read Drew more closely before dashing off my disagreement. (I should say though that I formed my opinion on this last night before I read Drew; I just never expressed it. So now, having read two people disagreeing, I'm more inclined to disown my previous opinion.)

1. The race obsession of the Obama administration is a sight to behold. Remember, these are people who adamantly refuse to see the Islamic underpinnings of jihadist terror, although those underpinnings are obvious and undeniable to anyone willing to look. Yet, racism, their unified field theory for interpreting all human phenomena, somehow explains al Qaeda. Sure.

2. I think all this "hearts and minds" stuff is way overdone. But if I were a believer in it, I would say that it does us no good to make stupid arguments. Al Qaeda is not a racist organization, it is an Islamist organization. The goal of Islamism is to establish a global caliphate in which all people either convert to Islam or accept the authority of the Islamic state (and, as the Koran puts it in Sura 9:29, "pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued"). Over the years, al Qaeda has shown itself willing to work with anyone who can be persuaded to support that goal — including Shiites, even though Sunnis actually do bear animus against them. Al Qaeda has never had any problem working with black people, whether in Africa, America, or anyplace else. The audience the administration is trying to reach knows that — better, apparently, than the administration does. So once again, our government ends up looking clueless.

I like his first point especially -- his thinking is extremely limited, and one could even say (properly; dictionary definition) retarded. The Racial Justice Narrative is totalitarian in its completeness and ability to explain everything and anything at all.

It is the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and I always object to such theories, because (wait for it...) they lack nuance and are strictly stupid in their reductivist drive to simplify everything into one simplified, simplistic bumper-sticker manifesto.

This is our nuanced, intellectual President? Babbling on with such simplistic, sophomoric credos?

Thanks to Dave @ Garfield Ridge, who also offers this observation.

One cynical angle to consider: if the Democratic leadership, NAACP, etc. considers the Tea Party movement racists, and now the White House considers Al Qaeda racist, ergo, logic argues that the Tea Party equals Al Qaeda.

Can't wait to hear more of that Lefty trope. Can't. Wait.

No, Dave, you're wrong; the left is eager to fight the Tea Party.

posted by Ace at 01:22 PM

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