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[unpopularblargh]

Jeffrey Gooldberg basically wrote a side-piece to The Obama Doctrine about what Obama feels the Republicans get wrong about ISIS and Islam and why you shouldn't look at it like communism during the Cold War.

Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...mmunism-islamism-isis/475833/?utm_source=SFFB

The great mass of the world’s billion-and-a-half Muslims are not ISIS supporters, nor sympathizers, and it is also true, of course, that most of ISIS’s victims are Muslim. Only Islam can truly defeat this movement. One reason Obama is cautious in using heated, or overly generalized, rhetoric is that he would like to avoid a situation in which ordinary Muslims come to believe that the West despises their religion. It is a core interest of ISIS to convince non-radicalized Muslims that there is no space for them in the West. Trump and Cruz are helping ISIS make this case; Obama, and the national-security apparatus of the United States, are not interested in doing this.

The danger comes, Obama told me, when people apply lessons of the struggle against communism in the struggle against Islamist terrorism.

“You have some on the Republican side who will insist that what we need is the same moral clarity with respect to radical Islam. Except, of course, communism was not embedded in a whole bunch of cultures, communism wasn’t a millennium-old religion that was embraced by a whole host of good, decent, hard-working people who are our allies. Communism for the most part was a foreign, abstract ideology that had been adopted by some nationalist figures, or those who were concerned about poverty and inequality in their countries but wasn’t organic to these cultures.”

Obama said that the manner in which a president discusses Islam has direct bearing on the fight against Islam’s most extreme manifestations. “I do believe that how the president of the United States talks about Islam and Muslims can strengthen or weaken the cause of those Muslims who we want to work with, and that when we use loose language that appears to pose a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, or the modern world and Islam, then we make it harder, not easier, for our friends and allies and ordinary people to resist and push back against the worst impulses inside the Muslim world.”

Obama added, “This is not speculation on my part. Let’s just track what has happened from the emergence of ISIS to the language that Donald Trump has used and his logical conclusion that we should ban Muslims from entering the country, including potentially Muslim citizens. That wasn’t by accident. I’m amused when I watch Republicans claim that Trump’s language is unacceptable, and ask, ‘How did we get here?’ We got here in part because the Republican base had been fed this notion that Islam is inherently violent, that this is who these folks are. And if you’ve been hearing that a lot, and then somebody shows up on the scene and says, well, the logical conclusion to civilizational conflict is we try to make sure that we’re not destroyed internally by this foreign civilization, that’s what you get.”

More at the link above.

P.S. You will be missed Obama.

 

[Mimosa97]

Damn. Obama has been dropping truth bombs right and left these last few months.

I still think that he should target radical Islam a bit more in his speeches and should show more support to secularists and muslim reformists in the muslim world though.

 

[Kyosaiga]

If this is how he is now, imagine when he leaves office.

Gonna be shitting on the GOP daily.

 

[Jonm1010]

I’m amused when I watch Republicans claim that Trump’s language is unacceptable, and ask, ‘How did we get here?’ We got here in part because the Republican base had been fed this notion that Islam is inherently violent, that this is who these folks are. And if you’ve been hearing that a lot, and then somebody shows up on the scene and says, well, the logical conclusion to civilizational conflict is we try to make sure that we’re not destroyed internally by this foreign civilization, that’s what you get.”

Obama has been reading my GAF posts again hasn't he?

 

[HK-47]

If this is how he is now, imagine when he leaves office.

Gonna be shitting on the GOP daily.

Nah he will go home and be a family man

 

[SecretMoblin]

Eek, this is similar to what Bush II did in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, taking on the "we are at war with Islam" mentality.

That rhetoric was necessary then and necessary now, but again it will fall on deaf ears :/

 

[theignoramus]

The Right hates Obama because he won't give them the red meat rhetoric they desire on terrorism and old US enemies.
In fact, he tries to make peace with old US foes, even more intolerable for them.