Afraid

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their supporters on the Left have come up with still another meme in an effort to control the conversation about Islam and terror. They have created what I'll call the "fear meme"—those who express concern for uncontrolled Muslim immigration and/or future attacks by radical Islamic terror groups have given in to irrational "fear."

Like their earlier memes—the motives meme, the gun control meme, and the anti-anti-Muslim immigration meme—the fear meme represents a combination of cynicism, dishonesty, and a rejection of objective reality. But no matter. The memesters are hard at work changing the subject.

The Left also gives in to fear—but only of things that threaten their narrative and the memes that are precipitated by it. They fear broad-based public knowledge of recent polls indicating that substantial percentages—averaging between 20 and 25 percent—of the Muslim world, including Muslims throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia—express support for Islamist thought and Islamist terror groups. By the way, 20 - 25 percent of 1.3 billion people is a very big number?

But the Left is also afraid that their moral posturing is completely out of step with what most Americans are thinking (of course, that does make them feel morally special, and that is something that's very important in their fantasy world view). According to New York Times/CBS News poll, 7 in 10 Americans perceive radical Islamic terror as a major threat to national security and according to Gallup polling, 67 percent believe further attacks in the homeland are likely in the relative near term and Barack Obama's approval rating has tanked.

Noah Rothman comments:

Regarding the potential political ramifications of this negative development for the president, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was asked today about Gallup’s numbers. Earnest’s tart reply: “Gallup predicted Mitt Romney would be president.”

There is no worthy response to this non sequitur; it was not designed to elicit one. The strategy here is clear, and it is one that this president has used to great effect in the past: Project to like minds in media that concerns over terrorism are a preoccupation of the intellectually sequestered right. To lend any credence to that notion would be to align yourself with that brutish, unthinking element in flyover country, and you wouldn’t want to be thought of by your peers in that way, would you?

Earnest's comment is oh so typical of the arrogance that emanates almost daily from the Obama White House. But when you think you're the smartest guys in the room and are continually proven you're not, I suppose arrogance is all you have left.

But back to the fear meme. Rothman suggests that its all part of a broader attempt at social pressure:

Americans who have the temerity to notice the heightened terrorist threat that Barack Obama’s own FBI director warned about are not wrong, and they don’t deserve to be shamed for it. Those like Earnest and Phillips [a Washington Post reporter who invoked a variety of Leftist memes to castigate Representative Loretta Sanchez, a Democratic candidate for Senate in California for suggesting that maybe there might be more than just a few Muslims who are supportive of radical Islamic terror groups] are not performing a public service. They’re signaling to liberal partisans that they have a social duty to act and behave in a particular fashion lest they invite the scorn of their enlightened peers. It’s a crude strategy that might pay off in the near-term, but that kind of social intimidation only reveals how ill-prepared the left is to truly address the terrorist threat.

But wait. The left doesn't really want to "address" the terrorist threat. They'd much rather change the subject, advance ever more strident memes, and hope that the whole problem will go away when "oppression" is ended and guns are abolished. Only then will al Qaeda, ISIS, al Nusra, Hamas, Hezballah and the hundreds of millions of their Muslim sympathizers sit down with Barack, Bernie, John Kerry, and Hillary—and sing Kumbayah.