Prevaricator in Chief

This morning Bret Stephens has some reflections on language. In part, he comments on Donald Trump’s use of language, but the meat of his column concerns the Obama administration’s systematic lies about Islamic terrorism.

Stephens begins by showing the extent that the Obama administration contorted language in order to lie about Islam and its relation to terrorism:

…. Islamist terrorism, or what former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano used to call “man-caused disasters” in order to “move away from the politics of fear,” as she explained in a 2009 Der Spiegel interview.

Napolitano’s “man-caused disasters” didn’t survive the political laugh test, but the fantastically elastic phrase “violent extremism” did. President Obama’s broad reluctance to use variants of the word “Islam” in proximity to “terrorism” became one of the staples of his presidency. The group that calls itself “Islamic State” was always and adamantly “ISIL” to him.

Remember Omar Mateen, who perpetrated the mass murder of 49 people at a gay nightclub. Might that count as homophobia? Not, to the Obama administration:

After Omar Mateen explicitly declared his fealty to the Islamic State in a 911 call and massacred 49 people at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in June 2016, Obama acknowledged the blood bath as “an act of terror” but stressed that the “precise motivations of the killer” remained unknown.

As for ideologically motivated students driving crowds into crowds, it happened when Obama was president, too:

Last November, a Somali student at Ohio State University rammed a car into a crowd of students and then began attacking them with a butcher knife before being shot dead. “If we increase our suspicion of people who practice a particular religion, we’re more likely to contribute to acts of violence than we are to prevent them,” said the White House spokesman Josh Earnest. As for Obama, I can find no record of him ever speaking publicly about the attack, which was so reminiscent of what happened Saturday in Charlottesville.

Of course, the administration tried to hand over Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood. They sent Secretary of State Hillary to Cairo to be the first foreign leader to congratulate Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi. And yet, the Brotherhood is an international terrorist organization, declared as such by places like the United Arab Emirates.

For the Obama administration, not so much:

The Muslim Brotherhood — whose credo includes the words “jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope” — was, according to the former director of national intelligence James Clapper, “a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda.”

The administration walked back the “largely secular” line, but remained equivocal about what is arguably the largest hate group in the world.

As for the administration sell-out to Iran, Obama saw it as reparations for the dastardly way the American government overthrew the Mossadegh government in 1953:

It also tended to equivocate when it came to apportioning historical blame for United States conflicts with militant adversaries. If Iran had taken Americans hostage and killed hundreds of our soldiers, well, as Obama often noted, hadn’t we helped overthrow the Mossadegh government back in 1953?