“Why Obama Won’t Talk About Islamic Terrorism,” is a topic explored by David Frum in the Atlantic. (OK, that’s two strikes against it, but read it anyhow.) It’s an essay that ties together Obama’s radical chic roots as a community organizer trained in the Alinsky methods hanging out with Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright, and brings his LBJ-era-inspired salad days full circle with his recent mutterings about the “randomly-targeted” in France and remember the Crusades, maaaan:
As part of the partnership-building, the Obama administration has opened its doors to foreign and domestic individuals and groups who might have been unwelcome in the prior administration, including supporters of the overthrown Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. Tom Wolfe anatomized this line of thinking in his classic essay, Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers:
The idea that the real leadership in the ghetto might be the gangs hung on with the poverty-youth-welfare establishment. It was considered a very sophisticated insight. The youth gangs weren’t petty criminals … there were “social bandits,” primitive revolutionaries … Of course, they were hidden from public view. That was why the true nature of ghetto leadership had eluded everyone for so long … So the poverty professionals were always on the lookout for the bad-acting dudes who were the “real leaders,” the “natural leaders,” the “charismatic figures” in the ghetto jungle. These were the kind of people the social-welfare professionals in the Kennedy Administration had in mind when they planned the poverty program in the first place. It was a truly adventurous and experimental approach they had. Instead of handing out alms, which never seemed to change anything, they would encourage the people in the ghettos to organize. They would help them become powerful enough to force the Establishment to give them what they needed.
What began as a farcical element of the antipoverty programs of the 1960s has ended in the tragedy of American national security policy in the 2010s.
Mona Charen spots a similar radical chic connection with Obama’s disastrous Crusades reference:
President Obama’s scolding of Western civilization at the National Prayer Breakfast (“Let’s not get up on our high horse”) may go down in history as the emblematic moment of his presidency. It was atrociously ill-timed and characteristically sophomoric. My colleague Jay Nordlinger observed that Obama sounded just like the students in the 1980s who, when presented with evidence of the Soviet gulag, would respond with the tu quoque rejoinder: “Well, what about racism?”
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Though [Obama] has come to power in an era when everyone except the village idiot understands that radical Islam is a worldwide menace claiming (mostly Muslim) victims on every continent, and that it has gained serious footholds even in formerly moderate nations like Turkey, this president and his party are so solipsistic that they cannot even see the Islamic world in its own terms. He and they can see it only as a victim of the West.
And of course, this administration, its enablers, and its Spokesbarbies are all perfectly prepared to play the victim cards themselves.
Related: Victor Davis Hanson’s Sunday essay on “The Reckoning,” for which I created the above Photoshop. And from Brendan O’Neill at Reason, “How Political Correctness Aided and Abetted Sex Crimes” in Rotherham, England.
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