In an interview aired Sunday on left-wing CBS, President Barack Obama blamed Donald Trump’s rhetoric for driving Islamic terrorism. Joining Face The Nation host John Dickerson, the president said the Republican presidential nominee’s political statements “do ISIL’s work.”
One of the best ways of preventing [Islamic terrorism], is making sure that we don’t divide our own country. That we don’t succumb to fear, that we don’t sacrifice our values. And that we send a very strong signal to the world and to every American citizen that we’re in this together.
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If we start engaging in the kinds of proposals that we’ve heard from Mr. Trump or some of his surrogates like Mr. Gingrich, where we start suggesting that we would apply religious tests to who could come in here, that we are screening Muslim Americans differently than we would others, then we are betraying that very thing that makes America exceptional, and that by the way has helped insulate us against some of the worst patterns of terrorist attacks because the Muslim American community here feels deeply American, and deeply committed to upholding the rule of law and working with law enforcement and rejecting intolerance and extremism that’s represented by the perversions of Islam that ISIL’s sending out through the internet or carrying out in the Middle East.
Dickerson offered no challenge or pushback to Obama’s claims in this regard. He also neglected to ask Obama about ideological, religious, or cultural drivers of Islamic terrorism. He also refused to inquire about unique social and political pathologies of Muslim-majority societies as they pertain to Islamic terrorism. Also ignored was Obama’s refusal to qualify this specific category of terrorism as “Islamic” or “Islamist” and his insistence that Islamic terrorists are “not Islamic.”
Obama, like-minded Democrats and left-wing personalities have repeated this position for months. What follows is a small sample of the chorus.
Last November, Obama said Trump’s rhetoric is a “recruitment tool” for ISIS. Less than a month later, CBS’s Ted Koppel said Trump is ISIS’s “recruiter in chief.”
Last December, Hillary Clinton said, “[Trump] is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter.” She has since repeated the claim many times. Left-wing PolitiFact, a misleading “fact-checker” site, ruled her claim as “TRUE” on its “TRUTH-O-METER.”
Left-wing CNN pushed the same narrative of Trump as a recruitment buoy for ISIS. Left-wing ABC’s Joy Behar repeated the refrain, describing Trump as ISIS’s “recruiter in chief.”
This narrative was repeated incessantly for weeks in the echo chamber that is the left-wing media landscape.
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