Jindal on Obama & Islamists: ‘If You Cannot Admit the Problem, You Cannot Fix the Problem’

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal wrote an op-ed for FoxNews.com, contending that the Obama administration is willfully blind to the true nature of ISIS and groups like it:

Mr. President, the American people are not as dimwitted as you seem to believe we are. We know that most Muslims have no interest in terrorism. It’s an obvious point, but for President Obama and the politically correct crowd, we do need to say it.

The American people are not looking to blame peace-loving Muslims for anything, but we also demand a leader who will be honest with us about the threat we are facing from radical Islamic terrorists.

We demand a leader who is going to spend less time criticizing America and more time hunting terrorists down and killing them.

If you cannot admit the problem, you cannot fix the problem. Our president cannot admit the problem of Radical Islamic terrorism, so he cannot possibly hope to fix it. Islam has a problem. There is an evil belief system that has taken root in radical Islam. It contends that many of us must be killed, women should be treated like property, some of us are eligible for slavery, and others need to be crucified.

One can’t help but wonder if Jindal gets particular vitriol from the Left for his comments on Islamist extremism because he’s Indian-American. Liberals declare that Jindal has a “Muslim problem” and he’s “blatantly Islamophobic” and MSNBC guests make vile comments. If you see the war on terror in simple, white-colonial-West-picking-on-oppressed-Third-World-minorities terms, a non-white American leader declaring that “an evil belief system has taken root in radical Islam” disrupts your narrative.

What’s fascinating is that a mere eight years ago, writers at the highest heights of media were assuring us that a non-white president would have a calming effect on the war on terror. Andrew Sullivan, December 1, 2007:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial — it’s central to an effective war strategy . . . 

It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The notion that a non-white American president would significantly alter the dynamics of the war on terror was always a fantasy. Conveniently, the Left is abandoning that fantasy at the precise moment that the Republicans might nominate a non-white presidential candidate.