During an appearance on Tuesday night’s Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer took the Obama administration to task for claiming that the biggest “error” America can make is to “blame Muslims collectively” for terrorist attacks around the world.
Speaking to Baier, Krauthammer called out the White House’s “straw man” argument and insisted that “everyone who is critical of radical Islam prefaces in saying of course it’s a minority of Islam. It’s not a way to attack all Muslims.”
Krauthammer’s remarks came in response to a recent speech Secretary of State John Kerry made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and the Fox News contributor rejected the Obama administration's argument regarding radical Islam:
It would be an error if we blamed all of the Muslims in the world for the crimes that are occurring including the latest one today in Libya, for example. It would be an error, but I’m not sure how many people in this country actually say that. That’s just a straw man. I mean, everyone who is critical of radical Islam prefaces in saying of course it’s a minority of Islam. It’s not a way to attack all Muslims. So this is a non-argument that he is making.
Krauthammer then proceeded to lay into the White House for failing to address the real threat America faces in the war on terror:
The biggest error that we make is to lose the damn war because we refuse to recognize who the enemy is and what it requires. That would be a larger error because it would consign people to, for example, the hell that is Syria today approaching now a quarter of a million dead. And the original sin here is not that Obama sort of is confused. I think he is in a way, but that he has a strategy. He came into office with a strategy. America leaves. This is not something that we should be involved in. We will leave.
The Fox News contributor concluded his remarks by insisting that Obama has no strategy to truly defeat radical Islamic terrorism and insisted that “this is a president who believes in withdrawal, and these are the fruits of withdrawal.”
H/T: Mediaite
See relevant transcript below.
Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier
January 27, 2015
BRET BAIER: You know, Charles, as we’ve talked about, words matter, how you say something matters. Here is the Secretary of State in Davos talking about the terrorist threat just a couple of days ago.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN KERRY: Today we are witnessing nothing more than a form of criminal anarchy, a nihilism which illegitimately claims an ideological and religious foundation. Obviously the biggest error that we could make would be to blame Muslims collectively for crimes not committed by Muslims alone, crimes that the overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose, crimes that their faith utterly rejects and that Muslim leaders themselves have the greatest ability to address.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: Thoughts about that.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, the biggest error that we can make, well, it would be an error if we blamed all of the Muslims in the world for the crimes that are occurring including the latest one today in Libya, for example. It would be an error, but I’m not sure how many people in this country actually say that. That’s just a straw man. I mean, everyone who is critical of radical Islam prefaces in saying of course it’s a minority of Islam. It’s not a way to attack all Muslims. So this is a non-argument that he is making. And it wouldn’t be the biggest error that we make.
The biggest error that we make is to lose the damn war because we refuse to recognize who the enemy is and what it requires. That would be a larger error because it would consign people to, for example, the hell that is Syria today approaching now a quarter of a million dead. And the original sin here is not that Obama sort of is confused. I think he is in a way, but that he has a strategy. He came into office with a strategy. America leaves. This is not something that we should be involved in. We will leave. And he didn’t quite understand, which is sort of an axiom of geopolitics, if America leaves the vacuum does not remain a vacuum.
There’s a story in the front page of the Wall Street Journal today about the comedy of errors of our supposedly equipping, arming, and training the Syrian rebels. They started almost two years ago, they have gotten nowhere. There was no impetus, there was no urgency, there was no logic behind what the president was doing. Everybody understood that he himself said and thought it was a fantasy. So he says it is a fantasy and says he is going to arm them. This is a president who believes in withdrawal, and these are the fruits of withdrawal.
