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(Caroline Glick) The operational, intelligence and political fiascos that led to and followed the September 11 jihadist assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, all derive from the same problem. That problem is the failure of US President Barack Obama's conceptual framework for understanding the Middle East.
The Islamic revolutionary wave sweeping across the Arab world has rent asunder the foundations of the US alliance system in the Middle East. But due to Obama's ideological commitment to an anti-American conceptual framework for understanding Middle Eastern politics, his administration cannot see what is happening.
That framework places the blame for all or most of the pathologies of the Muslim world on the US and Israel.
What Obama and his advisers can see is that there are many people who disagree with them. And so they adopted a policy of delegitimizing, discrediting and silencing their opponents. To this end, his administration has purged the US federal government's lexicon of all terms that are necessary to describe reality.
"Jihad," "Islamist," "radical Islam," "Islamic terrorism" and similar phrases have all been banned. The study of Islamist doctrine by government officials has been outlawed.
The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
Until he was sacked this week, the instructor taught a class called "Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism."
According to Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the instructor was fired for committing a thought crime. He "portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way." Dempsey himself ordered the probe of all Islamic courses across the US military educational system.
The administration's refusal to accept the plain fact that the Islamic regimes and forces now rising throughout the Muslim world threaten US interests is not its only conceptual failure.
Another failure, also deriving from Obama's embrace of the anti-American and anti-Israel foreign policy narrative, is also wreaking havoc on the region. And like the conceptual failure that led to the murderous attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, this conceptual failure will also come back to haunt America.
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