The Community Organizer’s Outreach to Aggrieved Communities
Weighing in on Barack Obama’s remarks to the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer said Obama “sounds like a community organizer talking about outreach to aggrieved communities.” Krauthammer continued: “If you listen to the president today and his emphasis on Islamic grievances on reaching out, on making the Muslims feel comfortable and not excluded, you would think that we are responding to the execution and the beheading of 21 Muslims on behalf of 21 extreme Christians somewhere in the world. It is so divorced from reality, as if the problem is the lack of understanding of Muslim grievances, particularly in the Middle East. We talk about root causes as if that’s going to make any difference whatsoever. There are rich people in ISIS, there are poor; there are educated, there are uneducated. The idea that somehow if you can eradicate poverty which in and of itself is an absurdity as if it’s going to make any difference is sort of a fantasy. And it’s a way to avoid the issue, as is the president’s language. He said I don’t want to legitimize these people by using the word Islamist. It’s as if you refused to call Nazis Nazis because they were not authentic socialists and they had a perverted idea of nationalism. I mean, you simply have to say, ‘Of course they are a branch of Islam, a very important one.’ They are all over the world, and unless you address the Islamic roots of it, you will get absolutely nowhere in trying to stop the recruiting and to stop their advances.”