Obama's Dangerous Delusions About Islamic Extremism

WashingtonExaminer.com

“We cannot kill our way out of this war,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Monday night. “We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s a lack of opportunity for jobs --”

Here, Matthews, cut her off.

“We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or fifty lifetimes,” he blurted out. “There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor Muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?”

Matthews, who is neither a hawk nor a knee-jerk critic of President Obama, had put his finger on the problem. To call economic deprivation a root cause of religious fanaticism is simply nonsensical.

As easy as it would be to blame Harf, it became obvious two days later, on Wednesday, that her blathering is administration policy. She was only expressing views of her boss.

During his public relations exercise masquerading as a "summit" on extremism, Obama — while first acknowledging, "Poverty alone does not cause someone to become a terrorist” — went on to argue, "What’s true, though, is that when millions of people, especially youth, are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester."

This is not absolutely untrue. But it is also beside the point. Many observers have accurately noted, as indeed Obama conceded, that many terrorists who have waged war against the West this century are not impoverished. On page 97 of his book Understanding Terror Networks, Marc Sageman notes that most of the 165 terrorists whose lives he studied, “did not suffer from long-term relative deprivation ... Most were from very well-to-do backgrounds and led lives more consistent with rising expectations than relative deprivation.”

Anecdotally, this is borne out in the lives of terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohammad Atta and Umar Abdulmutallab (the underwear bomber). They were wealthier and better educated than the average American.

So attempting to link terrorism to poverty is mostly a dishonest attempt to shoehorn the problem of global Islamist terrorism into the tried-and-tested liberal narrative of economic inequality.

But Obama's speech reflected a broader naiveté and detachment from reality. He engaged in cliches and shot down straw men such as "We are not at war with Islam" — as if any political leader is arguing that we should be. He spoke of terrorists as if they were the innocent victims of propaganda rather than adherents of an evil ideology.

Obama also referred to "violent extremism" in generic terms.

"We all know there is no one profile of a violent extremist or terrorist, so there’s no way to predict who will become radicalized," he said. "Around the world, and here in the United States, inexcusable acts of violence have been committed against people of different faiths, by people of different faiths — which is, of course, a betrayal of all our faiths."

The false equivalence between faiths is startling at a time when the Islamic State releases a video portraying the massacre of 21 Christian workers in Egypt, excoriating “the people of the cross, the followers of the hostile Egyptian Church" and featuring an Islamic executioner pointing a knife toward the Mediterranean and declaring, “We will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission.”

Obama argued that his rejection of the idea that Islamic extremism is a problem is actually part of a strategy to deny the Islamic State the legitimacy it seeks by portraying its acts as part of a religious struggle.

But Obama's stubborn refusal to see the threat for what it is — an evil radical Islamic ideology — has had increasingly dangerous consequences. It has made Obama misjudge the sinister goals of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early days of the so-called Arab Spring, made him underestimate the threat of the Islamic State as it amassed control over territory larger than the United Kingdom, and has clouded his thinking as he pursues reckless nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

As he wrapped up his speech, Obama read a Valentine note from an 11-year old American Muslim girl in which he said she wrote, "Please tell everyone that we are good people and we’re just like everyone else.” He then argued, "we do have to remember that 11-year-old girl. That’s our hope." But such cheap sentiment is jarring at a time when the Islamic State's list of atrocities grows.

Obama's delusions would almost be laughable — if America's national security weren't on the line.