Countering Violent Extremism

The Obama Administration wrapped up its three day White House Summit On Countering Violent Extremism with remarks by the President yesterday. It was Barack Obama at his best: He has the uncanny ability to see every facet of a problem and appeal to the emotion of everyone's interest. It's just too bad that this is the best he has to offer. When situations require leadership, he offers ambiguity. When people desire resolve, he offers equivocation.

Everything about this summit invoked ambiguity and evasion. Can any two people agree on exactly what "violent extremism" means? Glenn Katon, legal director for Muslim Advocates, was on NPR yesterday, and said the whole summit played into a fallacy of "referring to specific incidents of violence committed by Muslims," because, he said, that "only about 6 percent of acts of violent extremism in this country are carried out by Muslims."

I understand why the President avoids the use of the phrase "radical Islam" in favor of "violent extremism." He said that, "Muslim communities have a responsibility" to police the behavior of its worst actors. Very true, but he never once uses the word "reform" in his speech.

Islam is a religion that is badly in need of reform. Jordan is one of our allies in the war against the Islamic State. According to Pew, seventy-one percent of Jordanians believe that Sharia law should be the law of the land. Of those, eighty-two percent believe the punishment for leaving Islam should be the death penalty.

These are the type of people who believe thieves should have a hand cut off, or adulterers stoned, or in giving religious judges jurisdiction over family or property disputes. These are societies that do not believe in Western jurisprudence and due process. Obama is deceiving himself and his listeners when he says that "the essential ingredient to real and lasting stability and progress is not less democracy; it’s more democracy."

Democracy requires the involvement of an informed electorate. How can the electorate become informed when more books are translated into Spanish every year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years?

While Obama avoids using the word "reform," he does use the word "grievance" seven times. According to Obama, there are political, economic and historical injustices being borne by Muslims. Obama said "that there’s a strain of thought that... the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances, sometimes that's accurate, that so many of the ills in the Middle East flow from a history of colonialism or conspiracy."

If colonialism alone explained violent extremism, then India and the Philippines should be major sponsors of terrorism. It seems as though Obama will never stop apologizing for colonialism, and this wording comes close to providing justification of violence that flows from a history of colonialism.

I think this is edging closer to the root source of Obama's equivocation. I'm not one of those people who thinks Obama is a secret Muslim. I don't think he's a secret anything, including Christian. I think he will drag the family to church for the cameras during election season, but that's about it. Instead I believe Obama is more informed by a fear of racism.

I see a lot of comments on Twitter and social media that equate Islamophobia with racism. It is pointless to mention to these commentators that practitioners of Islam come from all races. There is a strain of recent historical scholarship that points to World War Two propaganda as inherently racist, and implies that American prosecution of the war against the Japanese was driven by racial hatred.

They point to posters that deployed racist stereotypes to help instill fear of the Japanese and rally American popular will in the war effort against them. When Tom Hanks was being interviewed about his HBO miniseries The Pacific, he was quoted as saying "back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods.

This is Hanks' way of apologizing for American conduct during the war, a war not fought by competing ideologies, but by emphasizing racial fears. Obama also wanted to apologize for American conduct during World War Two. He wanted to visit Hiroshima and apologize for the United States use of the atomic bomb, but was dissuaded by the Japanese government. And today, our Commander in Chief says that it is a "misconception" that there we are engaged in "some sort of clash of civilizations." Then stop sending our troops into harm's way.