On Tuesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about the Washington Post’s insane reaction to the killing of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Video and partial transcript below:
This is an unobjectionable win for the White House. This is an absolute good for the country. They’ve really done something great here, we have defeated ISIS, and I think the real reason that the Left is so upset about it is really the timing, too. It so cuts against the narrative that we were hearing just last week — the narrative was ISIS is about to re-form. You heard it from some Republicans who didn’t want Trump to pull those troops out of northern Syria — and not only is ISIS not currently re-forming, [but] ISIS has now been struck the most decisive blow in the history of ISIS.
This is a cause for some skepticism now, when we approach the mainstream media, because their predictions just keep being so wrong. The greatest example of this is actually not MSNBC — I don’t even want to really pick on MSNBC. The greatest example of this is The Washington Post. The Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, ran an obituary for the leader of ISIS that read — I am not making it up — it said that “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an austere religious scholar at helm of the Islamic State, dies at 48.”
An austere religious scholar. Adolf Hitler, passionate community planner and dynamic public speaker, dies at 56 — that was one version that went around on Twitter. Another one: Mao Zedong, who saved 20 to 45 million of his own people from having to suffer through the struggle of existence, dies at 82. I put one out: Attila the Hun, renowned world traveler and government administrator, dies at 46.
When I saw this Washington Post headline, I did not believe it, and it is not possible for me to have less respect for The Washington Post than I currently do. And yet even I said, This has to be a Babylon Bee parody of of The Washington Post. No, it was. It was real.
They then changed the headline — they changed the headline a few times. It was “extremist leader,” but a lot of it focused on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s scholarly training — on his expertise in Islam, and it’s such an irony because all we heard during the rise of ISIS is that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.
Here’s Barack Obama saying as much:
OBAMA: Now, let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents.
Look, let’s be perfectly clear. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has a Ph.D. in Islamic theology from Baghdad University — he doesn’t know nearly as much about Islam as me, some guy in America who is not a Muslim.
He also calls them ISIL instead of ISIS, which everybody called them. Obama would call them ISIL, because if he called them ISIS, it would acknowledge that Obama had completely bungled Iraq and Syria — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. So he called them ISIL, which was the Islamic State in the Levant, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which was a little muddier.
So Obama didn’t have to take total credit for it, but he completely bungled the thing up and it exposes this lie. The Left wants to have it both ways. The Left wants to revere this austere religious scholar — this one is like, gosh, this guy really knew a lot about Islam and then say, but also he doesn’t know anything about Islam. It depends what argument they’re trying to make about the religion of peace.
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