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Obama says that we are not fighting a war on Islam. What
he leaves out is that under his administration the United States is fighting in
a civil war that is taking place within Islam.
It’s not a conflict between the proverbial moderate Muslim
and the raging fanatic. That was an outdated Bush era notion. Instead Obama has
brought us into a fight between Muslim governments and Muslim terrorists, not
on the side of the governments we were allied with, but on the side of the
terrorists.
It’s why Egypt is shopping for French planes and Russian nukes. Yemen’s
government was run out of town by Obama’s new Iranian friends in a proxy war
with Saudi Arabia. And the Saudis are dumping oil.
Iran and Qatar are the regional powers Obama is closest to.
What these two countries have in common, is that despite their mutual hostility,
they are both international state sponsors of Islamic terrorism.
Obama’s diplomats will be negotiating with the Taliban in
Qatar. Among the Taliban delegation will be the terrorist leaders that Obama
freed from Gitmo. And Iran gets anything it wants, from Yemen to the bomb, by
using the threat of walking away in a huff from the hoax nuclear negotiations
as leverage.
In Syria and Iraq, Obama is fighting ISIS alongside Islamic
terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and Iran. In Libya, he overthrew a government in
support of Islamic terrorists. His administration has spoken out against
Egyptian air strikes against the Islamic State Jihadists in Libya who had
beheaded Coptic Christians.
At the prayer breakfast where he denounced Christianity for
the Crusades was the foreign minister of the Muslim Brotherhood government of
Sudan that has massacred Christians. Unlike Libya, where Obama used a false
claim of genocide to justify an illegal war, Sudan actually has committed
genocide. And yet Obama ruled out using force against Sudan’s genocide even
while he was running for office.
The United States now has a strange two-tier relationship
with the Middle East. On paper we retain a number of traditional alliances with
old allies such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, complete with arms sales,
foreign aid and florid speeches. But when it comes to policy, our new friends
are the terrorists.
American foreign policy is no longer guided by national
interests. Our allies have no input in it. It is shaped around the whims of
Qatar and Iran; it’s guided by the Muslim Brotherhood and defined by the
interests of state sponsors of terror. Our foreign policy is a policy of aiding
Islamic terrorists.
It’s only a question of which terrorists.
Obama’s familiar argument is that ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters shouldn’t be
called Islamic terrorists. Not even the politically correct sop of “Radical
Islam” is acceptable. The terrorists are perverting Islam, he claims. The claim
was banal even before September 11, but it bears an entirely new significance
from an administration that has put Muslim Brotherhood operatives into key
positions.
The administration is asserting the power to decide who is a
Muslim. It’s a theological position that means it is taking sides in a Muslim
civil war between Islamists.
This position is passed off as a strategy for undermining the
terrorists. Refusing to call the Islamic State by its name, using the more
derogatory “Daesh,” denying that the Islamic terrorists are acting in the name
of Islam, is supposed to inhibit recruitment. This claim is made despite the
flood of Muslims leaving the West to join ISIS. If any group should be
vulnerable to our propaganda, it should be them.
But that’s not what this is really about.
According recognition to a state is a powerful diplomatic
tool for shaping world politics. We refuse to recognize ISIS, as we initially
refused to recognize the USSR. Obama resumed diplomatic ties with Cuba. His
people negotiate and appease the Taliban even though it was in its own time
just as brutal as ISIS.
Obama is not willing to recognize ISIS as Islamic, but he
does recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as Islamic. Both are violent and
murderous Islamists. But only one of them is “legitimate” in his eyes.
Those choices are not about terrorist recruitment, but about
building a particular map of the region. Obama refuses to concede that
ISIS is Islamic, not because he worries that it will bring them more followers,
this is a tertiary long shot at best, but because he is supporting some of
their rivals.
The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism has brought a covert strategy out into the spotlight. Despite its name, it’s not countering violence or extremism.
The new director of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism
Communications, the axis of Obama’s CVE strategy, is Rashad Hussain who
appeared at Muslim Brotherhood front group events and defended the head of
Islamic Jihad. In attendance was Salam Al-Marayati of
the Muslim Public Affairs Council, yet another Muslim Brotherhood linked group,
who had urged Muslims not to cooperate with the FBI and defended Hamas and
Hezbollah.
In Syria, the United States is coordinating with Assad and
backing the Syrian rebels, who have their own extensive ties to the Muslim
Brotherhood and even Al Qaeda. This could be viewed as an “enemy of my enemy”
alliance, but this administration backed the Brotherhood before it viewed ISIS
as a threat. Top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, had focused
on outreach to Assad under Bush.
They’re not allying with Assad and the Brotherhood to beat
ISIS. They’re fighting ISIS to protect the Brotherhood and their deal with
Iran.
In the White House, Obama has tried to shape an Islamist
future for the Middle East, favoring Islamist governments in Turkey and
Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. He saw his role as paving
the way for the next generation of regional regimes that would be explicitly
Islamist.
The Arab Spring was a deceptive code name for a clean sweep
that would push out the old leaders like Mubarak and replace them with the
Muslim Brotherhood and other likeminded Islamists. Islamic terrorism, at least
against the United States, would end because their mission had been
accomplished.
Stabilizing unrest by putting the destabilizers in charge
wasn’t a new idea. Carter helped make it happen in Iran. And the more violent
an Islamic terrorist group is, the more important it is to find a way to stop
the violence by putting them in charge. The only two criteria that matter are
violence and dialogue.
So why isn’t Obama talking to ISIS? Because ISIS won’t
talk back. It’s impossible to support a terrorist group that won’t engage in
dialogue. If ISIS were to indicate any willingness to negotiate, diplomats
would be sitting around a table with headchoppers in less time than it takes a
Jordanian pilot to burn.
And that still might happen.
Obama isn’t trying to finish off ISIS. He’s keeping them on
the ropes the way that he did the Taliban. Over 2,000 Americans died on the off
chance that the Taliban would agree to the negotiations in Qatar. Compared to
that price in blood, the Bergdahl deal was small potatoes. And if Obama is
negotiating with the Taliban after all that, is there any doubt that he would
negotiate to integrate ISIS into Iraq and Syria?
Obama’s foreign policy in the region has been an
elaborate exercise in trying to draw up new maps for a caliphate. The inclusion
of terrorist groups in this program isn’t a mistake. It’s not naiveté or
blindness. It’s the whole point of the exercise which was to transform
terrorist groups into governments.
Stabilizing the region by turning terrorists into governments
may sound like pouring oil on a fire, but to progressives who believe in root
causes, rather than winning wars, violence is a symptom of discontent. The
problem isn’t the suicide bomber. It’s our power structure. Tear that down, as
Obama tried to do in Cairo, and the terrorists no longer have anything to fight
against because we aren’t in their way.
Bush tried to build up civil society to choke off terrorism.
Obama builds civil society around terrorists.
Obama does not believe that the terrorists are the
problem. He believes that we are the problem. His foreign policy is not about
fighting Islamic terrorists. It is about destroying our power to stop them.
He isn’t fighting terrorists. He’s fighting us.
