David Frum: Obama Won't Identify Terrorist Killers as "Islamic" Because He Believes the More Authentic and Attractive Version of Islam Is Deeply Anti-Liberal and Hostile to the West

That headline makes no sense.

Well I don't know how to sum this up in a sentence.

In dealing with this threat, the Obama administration has confronted a pair of difficult questions: What exactly is the nature of the threat? What are we trying to contain? This is a surprisingly difficult and contentious issue, and governments across the Western world have wrangled over it since 9/11.

One possible answer is that we are threatened by antidemocratic extremism, including religiously motivated antidemocratic extremism. British Prime Minister David Cameron forcefully presented this view in a speech to the Munich security conference in 2011:

We have got to get to the root of the problem, and we need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of where these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism. We should be equally clear what we mean by this term, and we must distinguish it from Islam.... Move along the spectrum, and you find people who may reject violence, but who accept various parts of the extremist worldview, including real hostility towards Western democracy and liberal values.

In Cameron’s view, violence is a symptom of a problem, but is not itself the problem. The problem is the rejection of liberal values by a substantial number of recent immigrants to liberal societies, and by their children and grandchildren. Terrorism manifests that rejection, but even when terrorism is contained by effective police work, the challenge remains intact.

The Obama administration repudiates this view. The Obama administration believes the problem is violent extremism. Of course it’s wrong, in this view, to kill cartoonists who caricature Muhammad. But wishing such cartoons suppressed by non-violent means does not present a similarly urgent threat. Indeed, those who wish such cartoons suppressed by means short of violence may be our best allies in the struggle against violence, precisely because they have the most credibility with the people who might otherwise turn to violence....

I don't want to steal any more. He goes on to state that the Obama leftists have borrowed this mode of thinking from 1960s hippie-types who were convinced that gang members represented the real authentic inner-city experience, so if we just have a "rap" session with those guys...

Worth a read.

I guess this should also be the place to discuss Obama's speech or press conference or whatever that shapeless blabber was. I would talk about it myself, except I didn't know His High Royalness would be Honoring Us All with His Divine Words that He Didn't Bother Thinking About Before He Came to the Dias.

Is Deeply Anti-Liberal and Hostile to the West&bodytext=That headline makes no sense. Well I don't know how to sum this up in a sentence. In dealing with this threat, the Obama administration has confronted a pair of difficult questions: What exactly is the nature of the threat?...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 04:57 PM

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