A recent news bulletin announced that police in Nova Scotia broke up a plot by two men who aimed to carry out mass murder at a shopping mall and then commit suicide.
Here is what the Associated Press said about the plot in its second paragraph:
“Police and other officials said it was not related to Islamic terrorism.”
Whew, that’s a relief. And a surprise.
If you shared my instant reactions, you also are wondering what the hell is going on with the Obama administration. When the liberal Associated Press feels the need to address readers’ assumptions about Islam and terrorism, we have a reached a tipping point.
Make that a worldwide tipping point. With the pope and Cardinal Timothy Dolan joining Jewish leaders and growing numbers of Muslim officials in Arab lands speaking honestly about the horrors perpetrated under Islam’s name, that leaves President Obama as the odd man out.
Not every Muslim is a terrorist. But almost all terrorists are Muslims. Those two statements are both accurate, as even Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi tacitly conceded when he scolded Islamic clerics for failing to halt the spread of jihadists. But inconvenient truths don’t matter to Obama.
The president’s ideological blinkers will be on vivid display this week, with 60 countries invited to a White House summit on extremism. But aides made clear there would be no change in the willful ignorance.
“We are not treating these people as part of a religion. We’re treating them as terrorists,” an official told reporters.
This is nuts. Although the Islamic State, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the Taliban cite Islam as the basis of their death cults, Obama argues that their acts are contrary to Islam, and therefore, refuses to associate them with Islam.
Thankfully, Christian leaders finally realize they cannot count on the president and must themselves sound the alarm about what is happening in Muslim countries. The beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya was the latest outrage linked to a genocidal religious cleansing.
As the pope and Dolan made clear, the victims were killed because of their faith, with the Islamic butchers calling them “people of the cross” and “crusaders.”
The fact that Jews are singled out for their religion is hardly in doubt — except at the White House. After Obama foolishly used the word “randomly” to describe the slaughter of four Jews in a Paris kosher deli, aides scrambled to defend him. They soon gave up, conceding what French authorities said all along — the slaughter was an anti-Semitic attack by a follower of the Islamic State.
Obama’s hesitation to admit the obvious fact about the victims echoes the refusal to properly call Islamic terrorists what they are.
At the same time, he has no problem standing up for Islam when he thinks its adherents are wronged. Although police have not concluded that the murder of three Muslims in North Carolina had anything to do with religion — the killer confessed and denied religion was an issue — the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation and Obama issued a statement suggesting the murders were hate crimes.
“No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship,” he said.
Remember, too, that he recently singled out the Crusades to warn Christians about getting on their “high horse” over Muslim killers.
If the issue were only semantics, it would be minor in the grand scheme. But the refusal to concede that Islamic terrorists are, in fact, Islamic leads to flawed understandings of the problem and missed chances for potential solutions.
One example of the garbage-in, garbage-out dynamic is the ridiculous assertion by a State Department official that jobs programs are part of the answer.
“We cannot win this war by killing them,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC, arguing that America should “help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.”
The rot of denial runs deep, and starts at the top.
It’s a rotten way to run a government
There he goes again.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is still sending mixed messages about his commitment to cleaning up Albany, saying on TV that “You’ve always had and you probably always will have some level of corruption.’’
Technically speaking, he’s right. But the context — a parade of government perps, including the arrest of former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — makes Cuomo sound too defensive and casts doubt on his latest promise to do something about the rotten apples.
Earlier this month, he proposed ethics demands that he said the Legislature must pass before he would sign a budget. He conceded then that “we have not yet proven . . . that Albany writ large can be trusted.”
He was right then, and wrong now. His suggestion that the crime wave is nothing extraordinary recalls Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warning about “defining deviancy down.” As the late senator noted, rot becomes permanent when people accept the abnormal as normal and give up trying to fix it.
Cuomo also said in the NY1 interview that there are no plans to hang the customary portrait of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer because he resigned in a prostitution scandal.
The old Soviet system of erasing out-of-favor pols from history comes to mind. Sure, Spitzer was a disgrace, but he belongs on Albany’s wall of governors. If nothing else, his face will be a daily reminder of what happens when politicians think they are above the law.
Let Client No. 9 take his place. And let his successors take their cue from his fall.
A ‘law’ unto Dem selves
In my next life, I want to come back as a progressive. That way, I’ll know everything for certain.
After a federal judge put a temporary halt to President Obama’s immigration orders, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Mini-Me, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, declared the judge wrong on the law.
Neither is a lawyer, but that didn’t stop them. The mayor called the president’s actions “lawful” and said he was confident the ruling would be overturned on appeal.
Mark-Viverito chimed in to say Obama’s “plan is constitutional and necessary.”
Inadvertently, the would-be tyrants point up a big potential for savings. With progressives in power, we don’t need judges, courts, checks and balances. We could just turn back the clock to the 18th century and go for a monarchy. Who needs elections?
Times hooey on St. Louie
The New York Times reports that murders in St. Louis increased 33 percent last year, to 159 in a city of 318,000 people. By comparison, New York had 328 murders in a city of 8.4 million.
The Times headline said, “Rise in Murders has St. Louis Debating Why.”
Really? Perhaps murder is out of control because St. Louis has a political culture that reflexively attacks cops for doing their jobs, brands them as racists and orders them to ignore looters and arsonists.
Just a guess, mind you.