I notice a lot of blog traffic today by people upset over the Obama administration's growing disconnect with reality on Islamic terrorism, occasioned by the latest White House reaction to an atrocity. "The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists," said the press secretary.
Twenty-one Egyptians, not Coptic Christians killed by Muslim jihadists. The prevailing theories for their inability to even acknowledge what is going on are: 1) Due to his upbringing, President Obama has more sympathy for Islam than Christianity or 2) Obama thinks the West in general and the U.S. in particular are too big on the world stage or 3) they genuinely believe that angering the terrorists will create more terrorism. How about a new theory? Maybe they're just plain dumb:
Marie Harf, a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department, said America can’t win against the Islamic State “by killing them” and ought instead to focus on addressing what she claimed was the root problem — their poor economy — and help them get jobs.
“We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them,” she said during a televised segment on “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. “So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. 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, whether…”
Sort of takes your breath away, doesn't it? Even Chris Matthews was startled and tried to get her to walk it back but she wouldn't.
We all have our blind spots, which sneak up on us when we're so committed to our strongly held ideology that we miss the obvious. Heaven knows its happened to me. I'm so passionate about small government and low taxes that sometimes I miss the obvious government program that makes sense and actually works.
Still, "give a terrorist a job, and he'll behave" is about as stupid as it gets.
