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Monday, May 22, 2017

Trump’s Simplistic Strategy on Jihadism - The New Yorker

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"Trump’s main message was  that Muslims must do more—much more—to fight militants who have proliferated from North Africa to South Asia since 9/11. ‘The nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them,’ he said. Reading slowly off a teleprompter, Trump urged, even demanded, ‘Drive them out! Drive them out of your places of worship! Drive them out of your communities! Drive them out of your holy land! And drive them out of this earth!’

Some of Trump’s language about Islam was right out of the Bush-Obama playbook. ‘This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations,’ he said. ‘This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life and decent people, all in the name of religion.’ He declared it ‘a battle between good and evil.’

Trump notably did not use one of his favorite terms—‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ His national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, has tried to get the President to avoid using the term, at least in public. During the campaign, Trump railed against Obama for not using it—and even charged that ‘anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country.’ In Riyadh, Trump’s original speech called for him, instead, to talk about ‘Islamist extremism.’ He veered off script, however, and talked about ‘confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds.’ Many Muslims are sensitive to the implication that Islam and extremism are synonymous.

Trump’s strategy differed most strikingly from Bush’s and Obama’s in its largely military approach to extremism. One of the top objectives of his maiden foreign tour is to create a coalition of Arab and Muslim countries to tackle extremism, confront Iran, and foster peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The coalition has been informally dubbed an ‘Arab nato.’

The President seems to have largely abandoned notions of promoting political openings or addressing economic grievances that have fuelled so much of the dissent and militancy, especially among Arab youth. Even oil-rich Saudi Arabia has high youth unemployment, estimated to exceed thirty per cent. The kingdom has produced thousands of jihadis who have joined both isis and Al Qaeda."

(Via.).  Trump’s Simplistic Strategy on Jihadism - The New Yorker:

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