Howard Dean—that celebrated scholar of Islam—has weighed in on today's murderous rampage in Paris, declaring that he refuses to call the shooters in this and similar cases "Muslim terrorists."
According to Dean, the disregard for the lives of others that these terrorists display "is not what the Koran says." Dean's denial of the obvious puts him in the company of many liberals, most notably including President Obama, who after the beheading of James Foley declared that ISIS "speaks for no religion." H/t MRC's Tim Graham.
Dean, Obama and their ilk fall prey to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, as described here by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal. Their illogic is dangerous. How do you defeat an enemy if you refuse to acknowledge what it is?
Note: Dean goes on to decry the fact that the shooters had Kalashnikovs despite France's "tremendous" gun control laws. Does "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" ring a bell, Howard?
WILLIE GEIST: 11 people dead, at least ten injured and five more seriously.
MKA BRZEZINSKI: We're looking at journalists being among the dead, too.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Howard?
HOWARD DEAN: You know, this is a chronic problem. I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They're about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else's life, that's not what the Koran says. Europe has an enormous radical problem. I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it's a cult.
BRZEZINSKI: Interesting, yeah.
DEAN: And I think you got to deal with these people. The interesting thing here, is we talked about guns the last time in regarding the United States, regarding how guns get in the hands of the kind of people that kill the two police officers here two weeks ago. France has tremendous gun control laws, and yet these people are able to get Kalashnikovs. So, this is really complicated stuff, and I think you have to treat these people as basically mass murderers. But I do not think we should accord them any particular religious respect, because I don't think, whatever they're claiming their motivation is, is clearly a twisted, cultish mind.
