President Obama is fond of invoking the term “narrative,” so it’s worth considering several instances in which he invokes exactly the wrong narrative–the wrong frame–around events.
The most obvious is the president’s repeated insistence that militant Islam is utterly disconnected from the Islamic faith. As this much-discussed essay in the Atlantic points out:
Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
The author, Graeme Wood, adds this:
According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
President Obama continues to insist the opposite, pretending that what is true is false, and even suggesting those who are speaking the truth are actually endangering the lives of innocent people. This makes Mr. Obama’s comments offensive as well as ignorant.
But that hardly exhausts the examples of false narratives employed by the president. As this exchange between Fox’s Ed Henry and White House press secretary Josh Earnest demonstrates, in its statement the White House avoided saying that the 21 Egyptian Christians who were beheaded by members of ISIS were Christian, even though that was the reason they were beheaded. At the same time the president suggested that the murder of three Muslim students at the University of North Carolina was because they were Muslim, when in fact that wasn’t by any means clear when the White House issued its statement. (The shooting appears to have involved a long-standing dispute over parking.) So when Christian faith is a factor in a massacre, it’s denied, and when there’s no evidence that the Islamic faith was a factor in a killing, it’s nevertheless asserted.
And then there was the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, in which the president and his attorney general constantly spoke about the shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson as if race was a factor in the shooting. That assertion is fiction. It was an invention, just as it was an invention to suggest, as the president did back in 2009, that the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley was racially motivated.
Here, then, are three separate examples of the president imposing a false narrative on events. (I could cite many others.) Which makes Mr. Obama a truly post-modern president, in which there is no objective truth but simply narrative. Mr. Obama doesn’t just distort the facts; he inverts them. He makes things up as he goes along. This kind of thing isn’t unusual to find in the academy. But to see a president and his aides so thoroughly deconstruct truth is quite rare, and evidence of a stunningly rigid and dogmatic mind.
The sheer audacity of Mr. Obama’s multipronged assault on truth is one of the more troubling aspects of his deeply troubling presidency.
He systematically dismisses relevant facts, and asserts dubious speculative hypotheses as if they were established truths. He seems to do this in order to make the policy goals he is aggressively advancing seem reasonable, modest, or inevitable. Truth, he treats with outright disdain. I think he is a classic sophist, not a post-modernist. I would characterize his approach as anti-philosophical; it is not a new post-modern approach to ‘truth.’
“The sheer audacity…” of Wehner’s refusal to speak the truth about our felonious, de facto President “…is one of the more troubling aspects of this deeply troubling…” writer. This, Let’s all pretend he’s a legal President, President had done more damage to this nation than any war this country has ever fought, including the Civil War. Wehner’s blackout of Obama’s indisputable felony fraud is practiced every day by every member of the establishment Conservative media. And when you do this for eight years, you are a collaborator.
President Obama is a very dangerous man indeed. Fueled by his self-righteousness he does whatever he likes and it is a good thing merely because he does it. His sycophants and enablers indulge their boy-king until he’s drunk with his own godliness. If anything can save us now it will be the courts and I don’t even know at this point whether he would obey a flat-out court ordered injunction on his lawlessness. I hate to say it but the time may come soon where sides will have to be chosen. The military hates him, but will it be enough to stop a direct order to fire on the citizenry? I don’t know, but we’re headed into some very choppy, dangerous waters here.
I like Peter Wehner very much, not least this clear eyed excoriation of the president’s repeated insistence that “militant Islam is utterly disconnected from the Islamic faith.” He effectivel quotes Bernard Haykel on Muslims who call the Islami State, unIslamic. That scholars bitingly says, they have a“politically correct, cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.”
I think that is right, but it a considerable turn-around from Wehner’s 2/20 post: “Islamism and Obama’s Dangerous Flight from Reality.” There he said: “To be sure, militant Islam is not a dominant current of thought within Islam.”
But it is. The religion is at bottom designed as an instrument of conquest.
A) It teaches that the world is divided into a realm of peace, where Islam prevails, and the non-Islamic world, the realm of war, which has not yet accepted the Koran.
B) Every Muslim is commanded to undertake jihad with the goal of bringing the realm of war into submission.
Many nowadays, especially non-Muslims, claim that that duty is meant to be fulfilled by mental struggle and moral efforts; that that is how Islam is meant to be defended and the realm of war eroded. History however, all the way back to Mohamed and the early caliphs, does not show pacific, spiritual exertions extendmg the Faith across the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Iran, India the Balkans. That was accomploshed by enormous and merciless violence. Yes, centuries later, missionaries across the Pacific, were converting countries like Indonesia without the sword. That MO is yet at work in Africa, but in competition with Boko Haram whose terrorist methods reflect Jihad’s typical and usual application since the 7th century.
C) The Faith assures itself of a powerful weapon, fearlessness. it creates the ideal warrior by guaranteeing Paradise to any Muslim who dies fighting for the creed.
That makes Mohammed’s third monotheism, in contrast to the other two, in its very bones, focused on bloody conquest.
Of course, if some, especially in the US, want to believe that theirs is a religion of peace, by all means. It makes sense not to antagonize the 1.5 billion Muslims, unnecessarily. But we have been misleading ourselves, much more than them. The pious read the suras and hadiths daily. Islam’s core teaching requires them to be understood literally. That is why it is a fundamentalist faith.
Mr. Wehner seems unaware of the fact that Obama’s assault on truth, ne, reality, is not a phenomenon limited to this administration. It is a core characteristic of the Left, now of the Democratic Party generally. It is a core feature of the Progressivism that Obama espouses. It is described and advocated by such as Richard Rorty. It is part and parcel of the denial of any such platonistic garbage (in the view of Rortian “Pragmatists”) as Truth or Reality. A key feature of late 20th Century American Pragmatism, the philosophical underpinning of Progressivism, is the absolute denial of the ability of humans to approach anything like “Truth”. One must only convince the majority of your view, and that is all. A key feature of Harvard Law is the idea that you don’t have to prove anything in a court of law, only convince the assembled jurors of your perspective. There exists no such thing as “truth” or “justice” (the only justice leftists will talk about is “Social Justice” as long as they get to define the term, which they do through obtaining and exercising political power and control of media, the academy, etc. They exist to mold opinion to their ends. Not to argue anything. They use words that they don’t define to make it appear that they are pursuing the general welfare. They scream bloody murder when they are not believed, all to intimidate and influence (as Obama did John Roberts on the Obamacare decision that Roberts so famously decided by actually splitting the baby in half, making law and words meaningless.
Note to Mr. Wehner. Obama is utterly a creature of the Far Left and he will say and do anything he thinks will enable his agenda at any given moment in time. He has no belief in Truth (which is why hs is not a Christian, only when convenient to his political ends). A belief in Truth automatically connotes a belief in God, and Obama obviously will lie gratuitously about religion, which practicing Christians don’t do, even under threat of death (reference the Coptic Christians slaughtered by ISIL–none recanted their faith despite their imminent demise. To the contrary, at the moment of death they reaffirmed their faith.
Why does Mr. Wehner think the Democratic Party at their most recent national convention tossed God out of their platform? The rot in the White House is the same rot engulfing the entirety of the Democratic Party. They all, as good Progressives, deny the concept of Natural Right upon which the nation was founded. I would suggest one question for Obama, or Hillary, or any other Progressive: Why do you reject Natural Right as found in the Declaration of independence? The problem is, of course that Obama or Hillary of any avid Progressive would lie about their view of the concept, for political expediency. They use language about like George Orwell described the use of Language in the old Soviet Union.
Obama has no god but himself and his far left agenda. That, as Tolestoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche all pointed out, means that everything is permitted. For a committed Progressive, there is no difference, as Feyerabend said, between Mother Teresa’s humanitarianism and Hitler’s Genocide. So Obama never gets troubled by the actions of ISIL. It’s all culturally relative. Hence his ghastly White House summit on “violent extremism”. As always, Obama sees Tea Partiers as greater threats than ISIL.
Our President is not the problem. He is who he is. Our problem is a press corps with limited opposition. Our problem is the TV networks who continue to protect him. Our problem is a Democratic Party who is willingingly allowing the President to lead us off a cliff. Our problem is a Republican Party without a clear leader or message. Obama has not suprised me in the least. I just never thought there would be enough Americans to re-elect him or to still be buying his BS six years into his time in office.
I still can’t believe that Americans were so stupid as to re-elect him.
Need we be reminded that Obama and two different spokesmen insisted for days that Jews who were murdered at a kosher supermarket (which Obama insisted on calling a deli) were victims of random violence, even though the killer bragged on radio that he had gone there on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath looking to kill Jews?