The villains in each case considered themselves soldiers of Allah fighting a holy war against America. In both instances the political correctness of government officials prevented discovery of the truth. Benghazi and Boston are symptoms of the same disorder. They are twin studies in evasion.
That’s from Matt Continetti’s Free Beacon column this morning.
It’s an important piece because it shows how, if we lie about our enemies, we can’t protect ourselves.
If the Benghazi attack had been just a spontaneous demonstration over a video run amok, the only responses, as Continetti points out, would be to encourage more cross-cultural exchanges and refrain from saying anything inflammatory. After all, you can't "target" a spontaneous demonstration. But if the attack is part of an international terrorist movement that aims to eliminate U.S. influence and impose sharia, then the response called for would be more strenuous. It would ask the Obama administration to see and do things it does not want to see or do.
A very similar evadion of the truth may have actually led to the four deaths in Boston:
These are the same people, the Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz reports, who have instituted a cultural change at the FBI that seeks “to dissociate Islam from terrorism, a policy critics say fails to properly identify the nature of an enemy engaged in waging religiously inspired war and insurgency against the United States and its allies.”
It was the same politically correct blindness that led so many in the media and government, in their absurd search for a “motive” in the Boston bombings, to downplay the religious dimension of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s plot against America, to willfully describe the bombers as “lone wolves” despite their ideological allegiances and familial ties to overseas militants.
Gertz’s sources suggest political correctness even may have played a part in the inability of the U.S. counterterrorism establishment to heed warnings from the Russians about the older Tsarnaev, whose every action in the run-up to the attack screamed, “Call the police.”
One reason the mainstream media is doing its best to ignore or play down the Benghazi hearings is that what happened on the ground in Benghazi exposes the fallacy of believing that a little more cultural exchange is going to be enough. Of course, there is another reason to dismiss the hearings: what we heard does not put two icons of the Democratic Party in a good light. But the falsehoods are unraveling.