Guest Editorial
By RICK MANNING | FEBRUARY 25, 2015
Obama's See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil summit
The headlines tell the story: evil is running amok around the world.
In just one week, 21 Egyptian Christians were beheaded in a horrifying five-minute video and 45 Iraqis were placed in cages and burned alive within five miles of a base where 300 U.S. Marines are surrounded by ISIS.
Yemen has fallen to al Qaeda and our Embassy Marines were ordered by the president to give up their arms to the enemy and leave the country.
Boko Haram, the African Islamic group against which President Obama used the "#BringBackOurGirls" hashtag campaign to fight their kidnapping of 200 Christian girls, has now attacked Chad and is on the move terrorizing Christian Africans in Nigeria and surrounding countries. Apparently Islamic-driven murderous armies intent upon world domination #arenotimpressedwithtwitterhashtags.
And in Copenhagen, Denmark, a free speech seminar was disrupted by an Islamic follower of Islamic State who murdered two participants.
Just in time, President Obama is having a "Confronting Violent Extremism" summit. A summit where it is against the rules to mention the common denominator in the horrific violence it is meant to discuss – Islamic extremism.
The Administration's shocking response to recent Islamic terror attacks should be an eye opener to anyone with delusions that President Obama has any interest in the real root causes of this worldwide phenomenon.
When speaking about the Paris attack on a Kosher deli, Obama dismissed it saying, "it is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you've got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris."
Apparently, the targeting of a Jewish deli by violent extremists who happen to be followers of Mohammed, has been downgraded to a random shooting of a bunch of folks.
Not to be outdone, his State Department spokesperson declared that violent extremism can be solved through a jobs program to get these at-risk purveyors of horror off the streets of whatever country they are scourging.
All of this should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. After all, it was the Obama administration that declared the murder of U.S. servicemen at Fort Hood by an Islamic extremist to be "workplace violence."
And it was President Obama who created a moral equivalency between the Crusades of the Middle Ages that eventually repelled the spread of Islam through the scimitar throughout Europe with modern Islamic extremist violence.
It is with this deliberate head-in-the-sand mindset that President Obama enters into his summit on violent extremism, looking desperately to create a moral equivalency to justify his Administration's political focus on targeting domestic conservative and Jewish groups, limiting First Amendment freedom and calling out Christians as extremists for opposing homosexual marriage. In Obama's world, refusing to bake a cake for a gay marriage seems to be more of an outrage than the mass slaughter of people of differing beliefs by Islamic extremists.
In President Obama's world, you dare not mention the common Islamic denominator between the various mass-murdering armies spreading across at least two continents, lest you stir up hate against all Muslims.
In his world, it is dangerous to discuss the Islamic influences that lead to violent extremism because the unavoidable truth once honest discourse begins is that there is an active debate within Islam about whether violence against infidels (the rest of us) should be the norm or should be condemned.
Failure to acknowledge this debate and to fully and completely support those Muslim nations like Jordan and Egypt, and others like Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon whose governments are confronting the evil that is Islamic violent extremism head on is a recipe for failure.
What's more, it is a prescription for a much larger future war that could have been much less deadly if only this Administration had the intellectual honesty to confront the evil of our time, rather than trying to wish it away.
The evidence of this evil can be heard from the jungles of Africa to the deserts of Iraq, it can be heard in India and in Paris, but the one place it won't be heard is at President Obama's "Confronting Violent Extremism" summit.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
