Can you spot the missing word here?

Just another day at the beach

Obama’s spokesman reacts to latest ISIS atrocity:

The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists. We offer our condolences to the families of the victims and our support to the Egyptian government and people as they grieve for their fellow citizens.

ISIL’s barbarity knows no bounds. It is unconstrained by faith, sect, or ethnicity. This wanton killing of innocents is just the most recent of the many vicious acts perpetrated by ISIL-affiliated terrorists against the people of the region, including the murders of dozens of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai, which only further galvanizes the international community to unite against ISIL.

That’s right, the missing word is “Christian” – not just “citizens”, but Christians.

Keith Koffler is not amused

President Obama’s determination to portray Islamist terrorism as merely “extremism” untethered from any religious motivation has now crossed the line from absurdity into profound offensiveness. These people died, horrifyingly, because of their religion. They are martyrs. But not, apparently, in the view of the White House.

Also deeply offensive is that the killings did not rate a “presidential” statement. The statement above was issued by the press secretary, a determination that is calculated based on what the White House perceives as its importance.

Clearly, this is part of Obama’s effort to minimize the threat from Islamist terror. It also may reflect his hostility toward Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew the Islamist revolution in Egypt that Obama supported and who has made clear that part of what is animating Islamist extremism comes from within Islam, and that Muslim religious leaders need to reform their practices.

The statement, furthermore, is inaccurate. ISIL is not “unstrained by faith, sect or ethnicity.” While it involves many sects and ethnicities, it features only one religion: Islam.

Of course ISIS is killing anyone who opposes it, from 3-year-old Muslim children to Jordanian pilots, but as Koffler points out, this is a war waged by Islamists – to deny that is absurd. And harmful.

A modern university must provide shelter from unsettling ideas

Future leaders of America: UNC-Wilmington students dare to speak truth to power (so long as it’s their mommies they’re yelling at, and so long as they are surrounded by their friends).

Student groups threaten “further action” if conservative group ever again invites them to debate values.

“Each of the leaders of PRIDE, NARAL and WSSA ask that you no longer contact us directly,” the email, obtained by Campus Reform said. “As a student organization, your events are on the CAIC calendar, part of Hawk e-News, and disseminated in a variety of other ways, which is sufficient for us to be aware of them. We do not need, nor want, these invitations. If you continue to attempt to contact any of us, we will take further action.”

In the email, the organizations said .. they will not participate in any debates with the Christian apologetics organization as they do not share the same beliefs when it comes to abortion and LGBT issues.

“As such, we have no desire to debate them with you or your organization,” the organizations said in the email.  We have no desire to attend any event sponsored by your organization and its narrow beliefs steeped in religious bigotry and intolerance.”

They don’t even appreciate the irony of that last sentence. Do we blame their teachers, or lowered IQs caused by too much soy milk?

Staying cool under fire

Trucker tosses refrigerator at police during highway chase

Shared sacrifice

Kill the rich!

While Daddy golfs in Palm Springs, Moochie and the girls are skiing in Aspen.

Asked for comment on this latest junket of the First Family, coming so soon after their three-week vacation to Hawaii, Greenwich Democratic Chairman Francis Farricker refused to apologize for the Obama’s seeming indifference to the plight of the middle class. “The Aspen trip was a reward from the American taxpayers to the First Lady and her daughters for all they’ve gone through the past year” he explained to FWIW,” and this year, too – why, the poor kids are giving up their spring break to travel to Japan with their mom this April, and as anyone who’s been there knows, Tokyo in April is hell on earth. I feel so sorry for them.”

Back to the war on inequality.

As long as he’s UNDER the rock, it’s got my vote

Too high up – drop him 500 feet

Poll: 21% of Democrats want to see Obama on Mt. Rushmore.

As brave Muslims react to ISIS’s latest atrocities, Obama engages in sophomoric moral relativism

Coolest dope on campus

Obama’s gambit is popular in college dorms, especially those at “elite” colleges, with intellectual teens too sophisticated to believe in verities or principles, but some adults, like Max Boot, are not amused, or impressed:

At first, I was prepared to defend President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast from conservatives who excoriated him for comparing (as the New York Times account put it) “the atrocities of the Islamic State to the bloodshed committed in the name of Christianity in centuries past.”

There are legitimate comparisons to be made. Indeed, just as Southern slaveowners once cited the Bible to defend slavery, so now ISIS cites Islamic law to defend its own form of slavery. Just as the Spanish Inquisition once burned heretics at the stake, so now ISIS burns alive a Jordanian pilot. More broadly the religious zealotry, bloodthirstiness, and intolerance of ISIS is indeed reminiscent in many ways, as Obama noted, of the Crusades.

But then I read the actual text of his speech and saw that his message wasn’t: Christianity was once intolerant but it has now reformed itself and Islam should do likewise. That’s an important message similar to the one that Egypt’s President Sisi recently delivered when he called for a “religious revolution” within Islam.

Alas, that’s not what President Obama said. What he actually said was: “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

When we see ISIS beheading and burning hostages, and “selling, crucifying, burying children alive,” I’d say we have every right to get on our “high horse” about that–even if Christians in centuries past committed their share of atrocities. In fact we have an obligation to get on our “high horse”–to make clear that ISIS’s conduct violates every norm of civilized behavior and will not be tolerated. To shrug our shoulders and say “everybody does it” is untrue and immoral.

… As for Obama’s claim that ISIS’s actions “are betraying” Islam–a claim he has made in the past–that too is a dubious statement and a presumptuous one for a non-Muslim to make. More accurate would be to say that ISIS’s actions are a betrayal of what we want Islam to be–but just as Christianity could be interpreted in centuries past to justify slavery and burning at the stake, so too Islam can be interpreted today to justify beheading of hostages and the enslaving of children. It does no good to deny the fact–indeed it is hard to imagine us fighting and defeating these Islamist extremists if we don’t recognize that their conduct has some grounding in Muslim tradition and has some support in the Muslim world.

No, that doesn’t mean that most Muslims are jihadists; the vast majority are not. But we need to be honest enough to recognize that ISIS’s actions, however reprehensible, have some real appeal to a minority of the Muslim world (see, for example, this article about Tunisia, which is one of the most moderate and stable corners of the Middle East), and we won’t change that fact by denying it away.

Obama’s speech reveals the fuzzy thinking behind his strategy in what used to be called “the war on terror.” Little wonder that across the greater Middle East–in countries such as Nigeria, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen–we are losing the struggle. If the president can’t even think clearly on these major issues, he certainly can’t act effectively.

Egypt’s President al-Sisi’s speech, by the way, was a huge thing, taking on as it did the millions of vicious Muslims who delight in the torture and terrorism being conducted by their fellows; it made Egypt, and President al-Sisi himself, a primary target of these horrible people. Obama, like everyone else in the Muslim world (CAIR, for instance) has yet to acknowledge that speech, or President al-Sisi’s courage.

Today, Egypt launched air strikes against ISIS in Libya, to retaliate for the beheading of 21 Christians. Obama, who is on  three-day golf trip to California, has said, and certainly done, nothing. “Hey man, like, the Crusaders did kinda the same thing, ya know? Pass the bong.”

But will he brave enough to order size small condoms?

NY Post. Photo: Brigitte Stelzer

Naked Cowboy worries about “shrinkage”