In PJ Media today I discuss a strange case of Barack Obama accidentally telling the truth.
Barack Obama, lauded for his allegedly spellbinding eloquence, sure makes a lot of verbal miscues: “57 states,” “my Muslim faith,” etc. If he were a conservative Republican, he would have long since been banished to the Dan Quayle Rest Home for Tongue-Tied Politicians.
Now he adds yet another to his Biden-worthy list: in his Pentagon address on the Islamic State (ISIS, or ISIL, as the president insists on calling the group) Obama boasted:
With the additional steps I ordered last month, we’re speeding up training of ISIL forces.
In a clumsy attempt to repair Obama’s slip, the transcript at White House.gov added the word “Iraqi” in brackets after “ISIL,” rendering the statement incoherent. And that was that, except for the lingering impression that Obama’s words had left. This particular presidential slip, judging by his policies, was more Freudian than most.
Because Obama was correct: his policies have resulted in the strengthening of ISIL forces by supplying them with much-needed weaponry.
We have given weapons to groups that the Pentagon has designated as “moderate,” groups such as the Free Syrian Army — which has collaborated with the Islamic State. The Obama administration’s avid yet fruitless search for “moderates” to fight the Islamic State resulted in the U.S. training and arming a great many jihadis now fighting for ISIS.
Last September, Obama said:
We have a Free Syrian Army and a moderate opposition that we have steadily been working with that we have vetted.
The New York Times explained that fighting the Islamic State was the particular goal Obama envisioned for these “moderates”:
Mr. Obama said he envisioned the Free Syrian Army’s providing the ground presence needed to confront ISIS in Syria.
Yet even at that time, the FSA was neither moderate nor a foe of the Islamic State.
Bassel Idriss, a Free Syrian Army commander, said in early September:
We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun.
Perhaps aware his group is supposed to be full of “vetted moderates” who are ready to fight the Islamic State, not work with it, he added:
We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice.
This included the Islamic State, the primary enemy they were supposed to be fighting.
The evidence that our “vetted moderates” were actually aligned with the group the U.S. vetted them to oppose dates back even further. Jordan Schachtel reported at Breitbart in July 2014:
[S]everal factions within the Syrian opposition force known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have pledged services to the Islamic State, the group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Sources and eyewitnesses said that the FSA has handed over its weapons to the Islamic State in large numbers.
Where did the Free Syrian Army get those weapons it turned over — in large numbers — to the Islamic State? From the United States, of course.
Where the Islamic State wasn’t given American materiel, it seized it. The Islamic State’s conquests include millions of dollars’ worth of American munitions and fighting equipment taken from the Iraqi Army.
When it conquered Mosul, the Islamic State is reported to have taken twenty-three hundred Humvees. At the fall of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, in May 2015, the Pentagon admitted that Iraqi troops abandoned the following to the Islamic State:
[A] half-dozen tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armoured personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees.
Video of a Ramadi police station from an Islamic State jihadi showed:
… box after box of American mortar shells and bullets that appeared shiny and new. Several Humvees, apparently not long out of the packing crates, sat abandoned nearby. “This is how we get our weapons … The Iraqi officials beg the Americans for weapons, and then they leave them here for us.”…
Read the rest here.
Ann Inquirer says
We all know there are no moderates in Islam.
the Oracle says
Yes, even PM Erdogan himself said the same.
mortimer says
Clarification: many have said ‘there is no moderate Islam’. That is partly true, but it isn’t 100% true. There are many levels of disagreement within Islam, but when jihadists take the charge, everyone else stands back waiting with baited breath.
No one expresses disagreement with the jihadists. President al Sisi of Egypt has expressed disagreement with the headquarters of Islam at Al Azhar University, but he is the commander of all Egyptian military forces and Egyptian police.
Don McKellar says
That’s right. There is only Islam.
As for moslems, they only work on a sliding scale, from less observant and lax all the way up to all-out mad dog jihadi.
miriamrove says
There are tens of millions of muslims my own family included. However the problem with these muslims is this: When you tell them Muslims are committing Jihad, their response is: real and good muslims do not do anything like that. They are not good muslims etc….These moderate muslims are obviously reading a different version of the Koran! m
Wellington says
Hi, mr. I hope you are doing well and enjoying fine cigars and good Scotch.
Interesting what you conveyed about many Muslims asserting that engaging in jihad means you’re not a good Muslim. This does not surprise me since many Christians and those of other faiths are also many times quite ignorant about what their own religion teaches. Of course, a Christian or a Buddhist or a Jew or a Hindu or…. who is ignorant of their own faith really has nothing to answer for since faiths other than Islam are not a threat to liberty. So, even though such people are religiously ignorant, this is essentially innocuous. But a Muslim ignorant of their own faith still very much has something to answer for since Islamic theology is iniquitous many times over.
Again, hope you are doing well. And hopefully your son who served in Afghanistan is coming along better as well. Take care.
Don Foss says
Maria, there is only one version of the Qur’an, so I suppose that you are implying that tens of millions are misinterreting it. That too is strange, since it is the very word of Allah given in the language he considered the best of all languages on the earth. So you are saying that Allah, wh has no limits and is perfect, cannot make his understood clearly? That because of his inability to communicate there are tens of thousands of people being killed in his name?
cs says
Include also the “Me and Michael”… WTF one.
mortimer says
Hillary’s role in the creation of ISIS should be explored. A lot of US weapons fell into the hands of ISIS somehow. She must be held to account since it happened on her watch.
voegelinian says
Very good article by Robert Spencer, chock-full of evidence to back up his argument.
As for Obama’s faux pas, rather than the classic Freudian Slip, it may have been its more recent (post-911) mutation, the Mohammedan Slip (which need not imply that “Obama is a Muslim”, since any number of other worldviews — the Useful Idiocy of PC MC, the co-dependent enabling by dhimmitude, the darker consanguinity of extreme Leftism or Marxism — can generate that species of solecism).
ted says
Obama rarely attends church.
his supports like to mock anyone who says he is muslim, but he does not do anything to contradict this.
Jean-Francois Morf says
Please Google: Allah Satan
and read…
Lynn says
Well he would be caught more often saying strange things if people actually listened to him.
His saying 57 states was merely a miss-speak. He knows the difference between the 50 United States and the 56 islamic states AND Palestine. But did the listeners know the difference…and which is closer to the potus heart?
This one is more subtle; what he said in one forced comment about terror attacks that killed Innocents. He did not use “innocent people or the innocent. He said Innocents. Now understand Innocents with a capitol I are muslims only. Innocent people or the innocent people are everybody else. He was only concerned about Innocents. Translated: only concerned/commented about muslims who were killed. BHO doesn’t give a crap about Americans unless they are black and or muslim.
And then he capped it all when he said: ” The future must not belong to those who slander islam.”
Care to unpack that one?! Do you know the meaning of slander as BHO uses it here. It’s the key to why BHO was so upset with Major Garret’s question.
Know that BHO is very pleased with his actions and non actions concerning isis.
Massimo says
“moderate” is term which refers to politics, not to religion. If Islam is a political ideology, then you can have a “moderate Islam”, but this would not making any sense if referred to religion. What a “moderate catholic” would mean? An a “moderate buddist”? Is pope Francis a moderate or an extremist catholic? We have known extremist catholics such has hermits, but they created much less problems.