Trumps coming war against Islam
That is a disturbing picture
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Donald Trump is about to lead the West into the third and darkest phase of its 15-year quest to neutralize the threat of Islamic extremism. The first was George W. Bush’s freedom initiative, which posited that political liberalization in the Middle East’s rotting autocracies would dry up terrorist recruiting. The second was the engagement policy of Barack Obama, who bet that respectful dialogue and attention to Muslim demands for justice — above all for the Palestinians — would make the West a less compelling target.
Both were widely judged to be failures. Now the new president will embrace the approach that both Bush and Obama explicitly ruled out as morally wrong and practically counterproductive: civilizational conflict.
The outlines of what might well be called the Trump crusade are easily located in the rhetoric of Stephen K. Bannon, Michael T. Flynn, Jeff Sessions and other Trump appointees. They describe a “long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam,” as Bannon put it, or “a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people,” as Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, has written.
Bush and Obama were careful to distinguish the terrorists of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State from Islam itself, which they described as a great religion worthy of respect. Not Flynn. Islam, he has said, is a cancer, a political movement masquerading as a religion and the product of an inferior culture. “I don’t believe that all cultures are morally equivalent, and I think the West, and especially America, is far more civilized, far more ethical and moral,” he argued in a book published this year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trumps-coming-war-against-islam/2016/12/11/edf3241c-bd60-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_2_na&utm_term=.d7d6e7eaf02a
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