Ambiguous

In the weekly White House address, Michele Obama spoke on the Boko Haram atrocities (although she did not use that word). In part, she said:

Like millions of people across the globe, my husband and I are outraged and heartbroken over the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls from their school dormitory in the middle of the night.

This unconscionable act was committed by a terrorist group determined to keep these girls from getting an education – grown men attempting to snuff out the aspirations of young girls.

And I want you to know that Barack has directed our government to do everything possible to support the Nigerian government’s efforts to find these girls and bring them home.

In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes, their dreams – and we can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now ...

And what happened in Nigeria was not an isolated incident…it’s a story we see every day as girls around the world risk their lives to pursue their ambitions.

A worthwhile sentiment, no doubt, but it is interesting that in her entire address, Mrs. Obama was remarkably ambiguous about the underlying ideology that has driven Boko Haram to commit its atrocities. She does not use the words, Islamist, Islam, Muslim or any other appropriate identifier to describe the "terrorists." Like almost all of the elites in the West, she refuses to identify the underlying cause of the terrorist violence.

Ralph Peters comments on this:

How can our elites ignore the immeasurable suffering inflicted on Muslims in the name of Islam? Al Qaeda and its franchises have slaughtered far more Muslims than they have Westerners. Don’t those victims count?

Islam is in the midst of a great civil war between those who wish to modernize their faith, and those who want to return Islam to an age of barbarism. Through our silence, we strengthen the fanatics.

Our elites even do their best to stifle the voices of inconvenient victims. Who in Hollywood stuck up for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of Islamists, when she was prevented from telling her story on-campus? That was an intellectual honor killing.

An entire civilization is failing before our eyes. Cultures whose values just don’t work in the 21st century are damning themselves to stagnation by oppressing the female half of their populations (and repressing the males, too). From Morocco to Pakistan, no state other than Israel is competitive in any significant field of human endeavor. In 2014, the Muslim Middle East not only cannot build a competitive automobile, but can’t produce a competitive bicycle.

And we pretend that everything is fine.

I’m sorry for those kidnapped schoolgirls. But I’m sorrier for the hundreds of millions of women in the Middle East who are invisible to us. Our silence puts us in the same class as the Germans and others who carefully closed their shutters as the local Jews were herded off to the railyards.

Wouldn't it be refreshing (not to mention, productive) if Michele Obama's husband or one of his designates used Peter's exact words to express "outrage" over the current state of affairs in the Middle East and North Africa? Instead, the administration and other progressives think that ambiguity somehow protects Muslims. It does not. In fact, it does just the opposite.