Since September 11, 2001, if not since the 1979 Iranian revolution, the American left has sought to minimize or deny the threat to Western civilization posed by violent Islamism. Peter Berkowitz examines the effect of this delusional thinking on the Obama administration and the effort of one notable left-wing figure to counteract it:
Only last week, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz staunchly denied to an incredulous press corps that the Taliban is a terrorist organization. . . . The purpose of the White House’s ludicrous denial is to hide that the basis of the Taliban’s enmity, strategy, and objectives is a doctrine of Islamic supremacy. Such suppression is nothing new for the administration. As early as early 2009, it renamed campaigns in the struggle against Islamic extremism “overseas contingency operations.” . . . Last September in a White House speech, Obama actually declared that IS—even as it was establishing a new caliphate in Iraq and Syria—had nothing to do with Islam.
As Berkowitz notes, “The president . . . has reasons grounded in the progressive or left-liberal sensibility that he epitomizes to avoid mention of the Islamic roots of the jihadists’ rage.” Those reasons have recently been laid bare in an essay, “Islamism and the Left,” by Michael Walzer, “one of the nation’s outstanding political theorists . . . [and] a politically engaged man of the left [who] criticizes fellow leftists from within the tent.”
Although he never mentions Obama by name, Walzer argues persuasively that the left has failed to adjust its thinking to the rise of “Islamist zealotry” because of a set of increasingly typical moral and intellectual errors. . . . [One can only hope that] Walzer’s bracing critique . . . will ascend speedily to the top of Barack Obama’s reading list.
Read more on RealClearPolitics: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/02/07/why_the_left_casts_a_blind_eye_on_radical_islam_125522.html