New emails exposed by WikiLeaks on Sunday detail how the Clinton campaign responded to the terrorist attack in San Bernardino.
If I didn’t read it myself, I’d barely believe it.
Here’s the towering denial of Islamic terrorism — I’d add the adjective nauseating — of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta and Hillary’s whole, rotten crew of terror apologists.
The emails were part of a trove of messages stolen from the gmail account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, who has had a long association with the Democratic presidential nominee and her husband, former President Bill Clinton. The email chain began on Dec. 2, when digital operative Matt Ortega forwarded a tweet from MSNBC host Christopher Hayes that named one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., attack as Sayeed Farook. Consultant Karen Finney forwarded the email to Podesta, commenting, “Damn.”
Podesta responded: “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk [sic] was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.”
Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, gunned down 14 people and injured 22 in a terror attack during a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center on Dec. 2. The attackers pledged their allegiance to ISIS before dying in a shootout with police later in the day.
But Podesta’s written lament of the shooter’s ethnicity underscores a long-running aversion in the Clinton campaign – and many in the Democratic party at large – to associating terrorist acts with any aspect of the Islamic religion.
In a 154-page debate prep book that was developed two months after the San Bernardino attacks, and also unearthed in the WikiLeaks document dump, topic 47 is devoted to “Should we call this Islamic terrorism?” Nowhere in the suggested seven-point answer does “Islamic terrorism” make an appearance. Instead, it’s suggested that Clinton call the enemy “radical jihadists.”
“Now, of course there are those who twist Islam to justify mass murder,” point three begins. “But we can’t buy into the same narrative that these barbaric, radical jihadists use to recruit new followers. Declaring war on Islam or demonizing the Muslim-American community is not only counter to our values – it plays right into the terrorists’ hands.”
Point seven states: “Radical jihadists underestimate us. We won’t turn on each other or turn on our principles. We will keep our country safe and strong, free and tolerant. And we will defeat those who threaten us.”
We are at war with radical Islam whether Clinton and Podesta like it or not. And no one with half a brain is saying we should declare war on Islam or demonize Muslim Americans. That, as the debate prep book makes clear, is a political talking point, unconnected to reality. It is a false choice — a strawman argument used to criticize political opponents.
It is a test of one’s “tolerance” not to mention “Islamic terrorism.” The idea that naming the enemy somehow plays into his hands is perverse. But this is what passes for strategy among liberal Democrats: try not to offend the terrorists and get them any madder at us.
Podesta’s fantasy that if only white people would go out and commit mass murder we would be validated in our belief that Muslims aren’t the only ones who commit terrorist acts takes the notion of “tolerance” to extremes. It’s frightening to think that he and Hillary Clinton might be responsible for the safety and security of Americans.
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