PrintJanuary 11, 2015
Obama: All Talk and No Action
Here is a very simple analogy: the West are the parents and radical Islam is the trouble-making son. Whenever the son misbehaves, the parents respond with a lecture about the need to behave in a proper manner but don't punish the wayward boy for his extremely bad behavior. Since there are no consequences, the son just keeps misbehaving while the parents keep responding with lectures with no real consequences that follow.
The president, playing the role of the parent on the world stage, is all talk and no action.
This is exactly what's happening today. Leaders of Western countries, especially Obama, give us the perfunctory lamentation about how the Charlie Hebdo massacre "was a terrible terrorist act and the United States stands in unity with France," yet doesn't do anything about it. And so the terrorists will just keep on killing. What the Western leaders don't get is that their message is for the wrong audience. It may sound great to politically correct liberals, it falls on deaf ears in the Islamic world.
Words are meaningless to them, their end-game is the destruction of Western civilization, which is something else Western elites also don't get, that this is a clash of civilizations and not the behavior of one or two disgruntled factions of Islam. And until the so-called moderates of Islam start speaking out, they are just as culpable for those that have been described as "hijacking Islam." That is an excuse that no longer flies and never did. It was just a sound bite of the politically correct.
The world desperately needs a leader to emerge like a Churchill or a Reagan, one who can call a spade a spade, that is, call out Islamic terrorism for what it is - EVIL - and that it needs to be dealt with in an exceedingly forceful way. Obama has had his policy of whack-a-mole of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the weak military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but this is clearly a joke. It's kabuki theater disguised as real action by the administration in order to try to fool the world that he's seriously addressing the real problem.
There should be overwhelming military action, for example, against ISIS, in order to send a message to Islamic terrorists everywhere that the West is not going to continue to sit back and keep on taking it. I believe this is one of the reasons why Bush went into Iraq, not just to take down Hussein and get rid of the chemical weapons he was thought to have, but to send a broader message to Islamist extremists everywhere after 9/11: "don't screw with us anymore or you will be next." The world needs that kind of action, but even stronger, that will deliver that kind of message, and it needs it fast.
Tim Jones is a freelance writer.
