Motives Do Matter

Barack Obama will address the nation tonight on the terror attack in San Bernadino. It will be interesting to see if he identifies the attackers as radical Islamic terrorists. My bet is he won't. In fact, over the past few days, Obama's supporters on the Left (including his trained hamsters at dozens of media outlets) are experimenting with a new meme in an increasingly desperate attempt to redirect the public's concern away from Islam.

The new meme is that motives don't matter. This from The New York Times:

“A Muslim extremist? A disgruntled worker? A Christian fanatic? A racist? A misogynist? With each mass shooting, Americans struggle to fathom what motivated the killer,” the Times wrote in an accompanying online “discussion.” “But does it matter whether someone is killed by a Muslim extremist or someone with a less dramatic reason to pull the trigger?”

The fact that many on the Left have adopted this new meme is telling. In essence, they want us to believe that there is no difference between a mass murder perpetrated by a psychotic individual at an elementary school or a movie theater and a mass murder perpetrated by one of many adherents to a twisted interpretation of a global religion. As awful as the Sandy Hook or Planned Parenthood mass murders were, they are not part of a larger, coordinated effort to terrorize a country. As reprehensible as the slaughter of innocents at a summer camp might be (an event that happened in Norway), it was not part of a declared war on the Western values, freedoms and culture.

Acts of radical Islamic terror are acts of war perpetrated by members of or sympathizers with Islamist groups. They may be conducted by deranged or psychotic Muslims, but they are NOT is any way analogous to random mass murders events. To suggest otherwise is not only intellectually dishonest, but dangerously naive (or knowingly cynical).

Motives. Do. Matter.

And when the motive is terror in the name of Islam, it is reasonable to call it such. It is the duty of national leaders in the West to make a clear distinction between an act of war perpetrated by a global group of Islamic fanatics and a one-off act of murder committed by a a deranged psychopath. There was no intent by the psychopaths at Sandy Hook or Planned Parenthood to destroy the West and subjugate its citizens to a totalitarian religious doctrine. That was exactly the intent in New York, London, Madrid, Mumbai, Ft. Hood, to name only a few, and now San Bernadino.