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Agschmid

(28,749 posts)
Sun May 17, 2015, 09:34 PM May 2015

Preaching to the Choir

ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, sounds like a Republican candidate for president.

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One of the hot issues in the 2016 presidential election is how to deal with terror and slaughter in the name of Islam. President Obama and Hillary Clinton refuse to call such violence Islamic. They insist that Muslims are victims, not allies, of ISIS and al-Qaida.

The Republican candidates for president say this reluctance to associate Islam with jihadi violence is naïve, wimpy, and dangerous. “We need a commander in chief who will once and for all call it what it is, and that is that radical Islamic terrorism is a threat to us all,” says Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Rick Santorum agrees: “Islam is an ideology. And we need to be honest about the American public about what the nature of our enemy really is.” Sen. Marco Rubio promises a Reaganesque crusade:

[W]e must restore America’s willingness to think big—to state boldly what we stand for and why it is right. Just as Reagan never flinched in his criticisms of the Soviet Union’s political and economic repressions, we must never shy away from demanding that China allow true freedom for its 1.3 billion people. Nor should we hesitate in calling the source of atrocities in the Middle East by its real name—radical Islam.


The Republicans don’t just call the enemy Islamic. They criticize Clinton and Obama for preaching coexistence. At last weekend’s South Carolina Freedom Summit, they laughed off the Crusades and defended mockery of Islam. Carly Fiorina, a former Republican Senate nominee now running for president, demanded to know why Clinton has advocated “religious tolerance” and “the need to empathize with our enemies while Christians are being beheaded and crucified.”

Republicans who talk this way think they’re being tough. In reality, however, they’re aiding the enemy. They’re doing for ISIS what they did for al-Qaida: assisting its recruitment, social media, and political strategy. Rhetorically, ISIS and the GOP are in perfect harmony.


Source.
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