Greg Sargent points to Politico's take on President Obama's speech this morning, which begins like so:
In a nearly 6,000-word address Thursday extending an olive branch to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama managed never to utter the one word that comes to mind most often when many Americans think about Islam: terrorism.
This is a remarkable assertion. Do most Americans think "terrorism" "most often" when they hear the word Islam? The reporter never cites any actual evidence to support this assertion. Maybe the reporter thinks of terrorism immediately when the word Islam comes up, but he's given no indication that anyone else feels that way. "More than that," the reporter writes, "Obama sought to decouple Islam entirely from those who perpetrate violence." Imagine! The President doesn't think of every single Muslim in the world as a de-facto enemy combatant!
Of course, the president did refer several times to the issue of terrorism and in forceful and uncompromising terms:
But let us be clear: Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet al Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.
The conservative objections to this speech, basically embodied in the above lede, seems to be with the idea that the President didn't actively go out of his way to disrespect or denigrate the people he was speaking to. That's a problem?
-- A. Serwer
