House of Eratosthenes

President Barack Obama has ignited fresh conservative criticism by saying “we don’t have a strategy yet” for airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria.

Republicans immediately jumped on the President’s comment during a news conference Thursday by saying it proved their longstanding complaint that his foreign policy failed to seriously respond to the terrorist threat from Sunni jihadists in the Syrian civil war.

CNN is funny. It wasn’t just conservatives, it was just about anyone listening. Just as, it wouldn’t be just conservative passengers having second thoughts if the pilot came out of the cockpit and said “By the way, I have no idea how to land this thing.”

Our Secretary of State sprang into action almost immediately with some “What He Meant To Say Was” platitudes, and to subtly ridicule anybody who might think “no strategy” just might mean, literally, no strategy. Doesn’t it fill you with confidence when your “leaders” stand by ready to belittle anybody who thinks things mean what they actually say?

But that’s not new, or too interesting. What interests me is what James Taranto found:

In that 2002 speech, [President Obama] said: “Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.”

Last Friday, he struck the same theme, though without bad-mouthing our so-called allies: “We have seen, frankly, in this region, economies that don’t work. So you’ve got tons of young people who see no prospect and no hope for the future and are attracted to some of these ideologies.”

Compare these quotes with candidate Obama’s notorious 2008 remark: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Reader Lavonne Kuykendall, who astutely spotted the similarity, observes:

It is crystal clear to any Christian that Obama is a nonbeliever, regardless of what he claims to be, and that is his business. But these comments make it clear that he sees all religious feeling to be essentially equivalent: an opiate for the masses to assuage their seething bitterness and anger.

Which, come to think of it, would also explain Jeremiah Wright.

It bears emphasis that the problem here is not Obama’s conjectural lack of faith or insincerity. It is, rather, his utter incomprehension of religious sentiment. How does one develop a strategy against an enemy one cannot understand?

Yes, I’ve made the acquaintance of some people like this. They seem to wake up each morning saying to themselves, “Oh joy it’s a new day, one in which all the haters are religious and all the religious people are haters.” Religion, they figure, is a bastard child of poverty and hopelessness, and in turn conceives hate, suffering, and nothing else. They’ve got it all mapped out. Bring them some evidence of a religious organization feeding the hungry or clothing the naked, or of a secular regime mistreating its subjects in any way, they blot it out. It’s all settled, religion is the cause of all the world’s problems and it is the only cause of all the world’s problems.

Most embarrassingly: They view the many acts of terrorism by Islamist radicals as just more problems caused by religion, absolutely refusing to see anything special about that faith. Any day now, the Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists and Jehovah’s Witnesses will start doing the same thing, or something. Cringe.

Well, I suppose it isn’t completely necessary to have a pious leader waging this battle against ISIS. If Obama doesn’t understand the threat, He could, hopefully, be advised by someone else who does. But it would be nice if we could see some attachment to reality up at those lofty heights. For that to be missing, is almost as discouraging for the rest of us as a missing strategy.

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“Utter Incomprehension of Religious Sentiment”Saturday, September 6th, 2014

“Utter Incomprehension of Religious Sentiment”
Saturday, September 6th, 2014