Thursday 23 June 2016

The Obama Doctrine: What the President Actually Thinks About Radical Islam - The Atlantic

Son and I, discussing Obama's reluctance to use the words "Islamic radicals" and the like, concluded that he was neither quite the fool nor the knave, but a queer combination of the two. That is, he knows about Islam and Islamism, but thinks it all too hard to face off.
That seems pretty much to be the gist of this insight into Obama's thinking by Daniel Greenfeld of The Atlantic.
Mind you, I don't recall Obama's 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world having quite the call for action to would-be Muslim reformers that Obama now says it was.
Must go back to that speech and check.
What I do recall of it was that it seemed to disproportionately blame the west for difficulties in west-Islam relations; and that it named a a number of alleged Islamic scientific inventions (eg the compass) that were nothing of the sort. Such factual errors gave me pause for the rest of the speech.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/obama-radical-islam/487079/


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