The Saudis are sort of allies, but he treats them like best friends.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Secretary of State John Kerry argued that although extremists may cite Islam as a justification for terrorism, the world should refrain from using the term “Islamic radicals.” Extremism, Kerry maintained, is apart from Islam, and the millions who support or engage in violence in its name are driven by “criminal conduct rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill seeking, and other factors.”
This soothing, half-baked philosophy is cant in the Obama administration. So when the Islamic State took credit for the beheading of Japanese hostage Haruna Yukawa, it shouldn’t have been surprising that the most important thing Rick Stengel, undersecretary of state for happy thoughts, could think to tweet to his followers was that there was “nothing religious about it.”
We’ve gone from incessantly offering (appropriate) distinctions among factions of Islam to fantasizing that terrorists are a bunch of shiftless, underprivileged adrenaline junkies with no particular philosophy at all. Religion is an organized collection of beliefs that makes sense of existence. Under no definition of “faith” is there a stipulation that it must be devoid of any violence. And whether or not violence used in Islam is a distortion of the faith is for people of that religion to work out for themselves.