RUTHFULLY YOURS

Apparently truth is not a valued commodity in Washington. By now, most people have read the profile of Ben Rhodes in the New York Times by David Samuels in which Mr. Rhodes, who is described as Obama’s “foreign policy guru” created an echo chamber—a fictitious reality of under-educated, newly minted journalists — to make the Islamic Republic of Iran appear much more benign than it actually is in order to sell the Iranian nuclear agreement to a skeptical American Congress and public.

I had expected heads to roll over this. Yet, not a single person has been fired. In fact, those who are most culpable have only been promoted up the ladder in the Obama administration where total fictions are peddled as truths, and where empty bromides are offered about how they would like ISIS and other radical Islamist terrorists to be treated.

For example, yesterday, while visiting grieving families of the 49 loved ones who were murdered by Omar Mateen in Pulse, a gay bar in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch prescribed how we should respond to this tragedy. “Our most effective weapon is compassion, unity and love … We need to find our common humanity,” remarked the Attorney General.

Love? Tell that to someone whose son’s head has been savagely cut off by ISIS or whose daughter has been kidnapped and raped and then sold into slavery.

There is currently a rigid dogma among some inside the beltway now, not to acknowledge that ISIS hates Yazidis, Christians, Shiites-or any Muslim who does not practice their precise brand of Islam, Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians and (of course) Jews, as well as gays.

Recently, members of my staff were in a Democratic congressional office, and the staffer refused to acknowledge that simple fact. He insisted that this was simply an LGBT issue. (Period. End of story.)

This administration has substituted wishful thinking for realistic sound policy, and it has become contagious. And one of the cornerstones of this wishful thinking is that Islam, in all its many varieties, is a religion of peace.

And when the facts do not fit their paradigm, then just edit out the facts. This is what occurred last Sunday, June 19^th on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd when the Attorney General had announced that they were to “release the partial transcripts of the killer’s calls with law enforcement” that night when Omar Mateen killed 49 people on Saturday, June 11^th.

When Mr. Todd questioned the Department of Justice’s decision to release a “partial transcript” her response was, “What we are not going to do is, we are not going to hear the killers pledges of allegiance to certain terrorist groups.”

The fact is that Mr. Mateen had made three calls to the FBI as he went on his shooting rampage, pledging allegiance to ISIS.

(This statement by Ms. Lynch was so incredibly blatant, so incredibly black and white, and so patronizing to the American public that it won the ire of many Republicans in Congress, and as of the 20^th, the Justice Department and the FBI  reversed themselves and have decided to release all of the transcripts.)

On June 16^th, journalist Ami Horowitz interviewed random people in Brooklyn and 100% of those he interviewed refused to acknowledge that the fact that Mr. Mateen had pledged allegiance to ISIS had anything to do with the killings. Instead, they blamed “the Republicans and Islamophobia.”

However, by in large there is a rigid political dogma that refuses to accept anything other than the politically correct sanctioned explanations for the Orlando attack. Like intellectual sheep, they follow the herd, parrot the predictable responses, and put their critical intellects on hold.

It is almost as though there has been a lobotomy of the brains of those on the political left.

This translates into the realm of foreign policy, as well. For so long, the mantra of “land for peace” has been pounded into people’s brains as the single solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; as well as for all of the problems that the world has been confronted with by radical Islam.

That is why, now, with the Middle East imploding, and with estimates of up to 500,000 Syrians killed by the hands of their brethren, where Libya, Iraq and Syria have become furtive ground for ISIS, where these wars have resulted in millions of displaced people and refugees, where there is mass slaughter, kidnapping and rape by radical Muslim terrorist groups of every stripe throughout the region, the world parrots the same old, tired solutions of how to respond to the assault on Western civilization by radical Islam.

Take Israel, the one state that is stable in the entire region, which some would like to carve up so it no longer has defensible borders. And that state lives in a treacherous neighborhood.

That is precisely what the European Union, under the aegis of the French, together with Secretary of State John Kerry, are engaged in right now. They with their moral narcissism are standing in judgment of a nation that has already made huge sacrifices on the altar of peace, which has only resulted in more terrorism, more bloodshed and more war.

Pardon moi? It is not as though the offer hasn’t been made before. It has been made over and over again, from the time of the Peel Commission in 1938, to the U.N. Mandate of 1948, to the far-reaching Wye River offer made by Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1998, to the farther-reaching offer that Prime Minister Ehud Barak made to Chairman Arafat in 2000, to the still farther-reaching offer that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in 2008.

But of course that would require some basic knowledge of the facts, and the lobotomized left does not seem to have nearly as much time to study relatively recent history, as they have to castigate the one, stable, liberal democracy in the region as the only obstacle to peace between the West and the Muslim world.

Sarah N. Stern is the Founder and President of EMET, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, an unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-American think tank and policy institute in Washington, DC.