The Patriot Post® · A Battle of Narratives?

On Sunday, while the search for bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami was unfolding, CNN had Barack Obama spokesman Josh Earnest in the studio for an interview. Earnest made a point to stress that the U.S. battle against Islamic terror was a “battle of narratives.” He said, “What I am telling you is that we are, when it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight — a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle, and what ISIL wants to do is they want to project that they are an organization that is representing Islam in a fight and a war against the West and a war against the United States.”

However, it appears that the real battle over narratives is not primarily between the U.S. and ISIL but between leftists and conservatives. Consider how CNN reported on Donald Trump’s remarks after the bombings. A CNN headline read: “Trump Says ‘Racial Profiling’ Will Stop Terror.” The problem is that Trump never said “racial” in his comments on the need for better vetting of immigrants. CNN simply injected the word into its coverage. Clearly, CNN wants to promote a false image of Trump being a racist.

Then there was MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. He tweeted: “We’re also very very lucky that the attackers tried to use explosives rather than guns.” Hayes, seeking to make some anti-gun point, comes across as completely out of touch with regard to the actual issue at hand. This kind of unabashed exploitation of a horrific event in order to further some unconnected social agenda has become increasingly common for the Leftmedia. On a side note, to counter Hayes’ foolish comment, it was a citizen armed with a handgun who stopped the knife-wielding attacker in Minnesota.

Back to Earnest’s comments on a “battle of narratives,” the Democrat leadership and specifically Hillary Clinton, who was the secretary of state at the time of ISIL’s rise, and current Secretary of State John Kerry are responsible for framing this as a battle of narratives rather than what it truly is — a war against American values. To deny the radical Islamic ideological motivation for these terrorist attacks and boil them down to merely a “battle of narratives” is to deny reality.