You may have noticed a little while back that the US Embassy in Cairo called out the Egyptian government/Muslim Brotherhood for saying one thing in English (read: Western foreign consumption) and another in Arabic (read: domestic/regional consumption). Which is all to the good… so why did the President do the same thing this week?

The View: “In an interview with ABC’s “The View,” Obama — who is in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly — was asked if the Benghazi assault was indeed terrorism. “There’s no doubt that the kind of weapons that were used, the ongoing assault, that it wasn’t just a mob action,” Obama said.”

Obama’s UN speech: “In every country, there are those who find different religious beliefs threatening; in every culture, those who love freedom for themselves must ask how much they are willing to tolerate freedom for others. That is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.”

…Annnnd that’s pretty much everything that the President had to say at the UN as to why we are having ongoing riots in the Middle East in the first place: it’s all because of that video. Oh, sure, the President admitted that Iran funds terrorist groups; but he knows, you know, and I know that the Benghazi attack (and probably the triggering riots*) were started up by an al-Qaeda affiliate (read: Sunni), while Iran prefers to work through groups like Hezbollah (read: Shi’ite). Which most of the people at the UN know, too – so yeah, they’re getting a message loud and clear, and it’s this: Barack Obama doesn’t want to look too closely at existing terror networks in the Middle East.

Sorry if I seem cynical about this. But while I see a lot of pablum in this UN speech about needing to avoid violence and respecting other people’s religious rights and avoiding blanket denunciations of entire groups what I did NOT see was a brutal truth: there is a network of terrorist organizations who like violence, hate all religions not their own, are quite fond of blanket denunciations – and are ready to murder innocents en masse to further their aims. Barack Obama seems to be laboring under – or pandering to – the delusion that the reason why we have such problems in the Middle East is because people there don’t understand us and don’t understand their ways; and if we just explain things properly then everything will become hunky-dory and the Middle East will bake us a cake. The truth is, of course, is that the groups causing all the violence understand us, and our ways, just fine.

They just hate both.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Which is not the same as saying Every riot/demonstration is being actively controlled by terrorist groups. The goal is to make these things self-sustaining, after all.