Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has responded to the Orlando terror attack by saying, "I won't declare war on religion."
What a silly statement. What sane person is for declaring war on religion? In the aftermath of the slaughter in Florida, however, it might be good if Mrs. Clinton and President Obama could bring themselves to state the obvious, that it is a form of Islam that led to this horrific act. Acknowledging this is not declaring war on any religion, including Islam.
It is facing the truth, and we will not be able to protect ourselves from this kind of terror unless we fully face source: it is radical Islamic terrorism. Mrs. Clinton should not hide behind our guarantee of religious freedom to avoid stating this painfully obvious truth. Equally offensive statements came from a Boston Globe journalist who opined that we must all bear responsibility for the Orlando attack and President Obama, who, as John Podhoretz points out was vacuous and formulaic. Podhoretz writes:
Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.
He called it “terror,” which it is. But using the word “terror” without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease “cancer” without making note of the affected area of the body — because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes, he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.
So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.
America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.
An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite.
The attack on the Pulse nightclub was an attack on us all, no less than the World Trade Center attack.
Interestingly, while not exactly declaring war on religion, Mrs. Clinton in her keynote address at last year's Women in the World Summit (a Clinton-sponsored extravaganza for celebrity and left-thinking women), did pretty much tell religion to shape up or ship out (as we used to say in boarding school):
"Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will,” she explained. “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century and not just for women but for everyone — and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States.”
When one in three of everybody who was in the club was killed or wounded, it is a time for candor.