Columnist and author Charles Krauthammer argued that President Obama denies reality by refusing to identify “the Islamist character” of terrorist “barbarism” during a discussion of the president’s praise for a cleric who advocated a fatwa against Americans on Friday’s broadcast of “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.
“This is consistent in this administration to downplay the Islamist character of the barbarism that we see around the world” Krauthammer said, adding that he would guess “he’s afraid that if he acknowledges the obvious reality people will associate Islam with this barbarism and make them equivalent whereas nobody is asking him to do that.”
“He calls it ‘violent extremism.’ He used the phrase three times at the UN as if the violence that we see around the world in Nigeria, in Mali, in Libya, in Kenya, in Somalia, in Yemen, in, of course, Syria, Iraq, in Pakistan. As if all of these by an amazing coincidence are perpetrated in the name of Islam. Of course the majority of Muslims are peaceful. But to deny the roots of this ideology in a great religion is to deny reality and to intellectually and morally disarm those who want to fight it. If you can’t name the enemy, you don’t want to identify the enemy, you can’t correctly fight the enemy. For God sakes, even the United Arab Emirates called ISIS Islamic extremism, and ISIS itself calls itself the Islamic State. They proudly proclaim this, and Obama denies it.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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