Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insulted her country while traveling in the Middle East this past week and participating in a televised feel-good town hall-style meeting at a college in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
This is nothing new for the Obama administration, which makes a habit of trying to make dysfunctional societies feel better by highlighting our faults and engaging in a game of moral equivalency. However, Clinton took this game to a whole new, disgraceful level.
Twisting the truth about the alleged Arizona murderer, Jared Loughner, Clinton characterized him as an “extremist” influenced by “the crazy voices that sometimes get on the TV.” There is no evidence for her to make such a connection. In fact, the evidence adduced so far shows that Loughner is simply a nutjob. The voices he hears are all in his head. Nevertheless, Clinton used the tragic shooting to tell her Abu Dhabi audience that we are on the same level as they are when it comes to the threat from extremists lurking in our respective societies.
Clinton got into this discussion when she was asked why Americans appear to blame the entire Arab world for 9/11. Instead of firmly dispelling the myth that Americans blame all Arabs or all Muslims for 9/11 and pointing out Americans’ legitimate concerns with the widespread fundamentalist strains of Islam that call for jihad and hatred against non-Muslims, our Secretary of State sought fit to say the following:
We have the same kind of problems…the extremists and their voices, the crazy voices that sometimes get on the TV, that’s not who we are, that’s not who you are, and what we have to do is get through that and make it clear that doesn’t represent either American or Arab ideas or opinions.
