How did we
become a country more afraid of causing offense than playing defense?
By BRET STEPHENS
Nobody
who watched Barack Obama’s
speech Sunday night outlining his strategy to defeat Islamic State could have
come away disappointed by the performance. Disappointment presupposes hope for something
better. That ship sailed, and sank, a long time ago.
By
now we are familiar with the cast of Mr. Obama’s mind. He does not make a case;
he preaches a moral. He mistakes repetition for persuasion. He does not struggle
with the direction, details or trade-offs of policy because he’s figured them
all out. His policies never fail; it’s our patience that he finds wanting. He
asks not what he can do for his country but what his country can do for him.
And
what’s that? It is for us to see what has long been obvious to him, like an
exasperated teacher explaining simple concepts to a classroom of morons.
Anyone? Anyone?
That’s
why nearly everything the president said last night he has said before, and in
the same shopworn phrases. His four-point strategy for defeating ISIS is
unchanged. His habit of telling us—and our enemies—what he isn’t going to do
dates back to the earliest days of his presidency. His belief that terrorism is
another gun-control issue draws on the deep wells of liberal true belief. His
demand for a symbolic congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force is
at least a year old, though as recently as 2013 he was demanding that Congress
kill the AUMF altogether. Back then he was busy boasting that al Qaeda was on a
path to defeat.
The
more grating parts of Mr. Obama’s speech came when he touched on the subject of
Islam and Muslims. “We cannot,” he intoned, “turn against one another by
letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam.” Terrorism,
as he sees it, is to be feared less for the harm it causes than for the
overreaction it risks eliciting.
This
is the president as master of the pre-emptive self-reproach—the suggestion that
Americans are always on the verge of returning to the wickedness whence we
came. But since when have we turned against one another, or defined the war on
terror as a war on Islam?
Syed Rizwan Farook, a heavily bearded and openly devout
Muslim, was a county employee in good standing with his colleagues who didn’t
raise an eyebrow until he and his foreign bride opened fire in San Bernardino.
The first 48 hours of the investigation amounted to a nationwide flight from
the obvious, a heroic exercise in cultural sensitivity and intellectual
restraint, as every motive except for jihad was mooted as a potential
explanation for mass murder. Had Farook’s wife not sworn allegiance to ISIS
moments before the attack, we might still be debating whether an act of
Islamist terrorism had really happened.
On
Sunday the Italian newspaper La
Stampa carried an interview with
Farook’s father, also named Syed. “My son said that he shared [ISIS leader Abu
Bakr] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and
supported the creation of Islamic State,” the elder Farook told correspondent Paolo Mastrolilli. “He was also obsessed with Israel.”
The
father went on to explain that he had tried to reason with his son by saying
that Israel would no longer exist in a couple of years and that the Jews would
soon be returning to Ukraine, so there was no need to take up arms for jihad.
“But he did not listen to me, he was obsessed.”
Now
the Farook family professes utter shock at what’s happened. How can they be
shocked? How did we become a society in which a son tells his father that he
supports ISIS and it fails to register with this ostensibly integrated Muslim
family, living the American dream, that perhaps a call to the FBI would be
appropriate?
Here’s
how we became that society: By pretending that the extreme branch of Islam to
which Farook plainly belonged is a protected religion rather than a dangerous
ideology. By supposing that it is somehow immoral to harbor graver reservations
about 10,000 refugees from Syria or Iraq than, say, New Zealand. By being so
afraid to give moral offense that we neglect to play the most elementary form
of defense.
If
you see something, say something, goes the ubiquitous slogan. But heaven help
you if what you see and say turns out to be the wrong something—an alarm clock,
for instance, as opposed to a bomb.
This
is President Obama’s vision of society, and it is why he delivered this
sterile, scolding homily that offered no serious defense against the next
jihadist massacre. We have become a country that doesn’t rouse itself to
seriousness except when a great many people are murdered. Fourteen deaths
apparently isn’t going to move the policy needle, as far as this president is
concerned. Will 1,400?