President Obama is so wedded to his faulty notion that ISIS has absolutely nothing at all to do with Islamic theology that he banned a group of reform-minded Muslims from the just-concluded Countering Violent Extremism summit, the Washington Examiner is reporting today.
Here's an excerpt from Charles Hoskinson's story.
The White House excluded members of a prominent group of reformist Muslims from its terror summit this week, apparently because President Obama rejects their argument that such groups as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are actually motivated by Islam.
A group of 23 prominent Muslim reformers signed a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times on Jan. 11 asking "What can Muslims do to reclaim their 'beautiful religion'?"
But Obama and officials throughout his administration deny any connection between Islam and the terrorists beheading and burning their victims in a reign of terror in the Middle East.
Muslim reformers say the administration is ignoring them because they disagree with Obama's refusal to acknowledge the Islamic roots of the extremists' ideology.
Some of the most prominent reformers have argued for years that the ideological and theological roots of Islamist extremism must be addressed, but administration officials carefully avoided exactly that subject during Obama's three-day summit.
The White House is also undermining its own efforts by working with people who sympathize with the goals of violent extremist groups, if not their methods, the reformers say.
"We have to own the issue of extremist Islamic theology in order to defeat it and remove it from our world. We have to name it to tame it," Muslim journalists Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa wrote in an essay published Friday by the Daily Beast.
"Among Muslims, stuck in face-saving, shame-based cultures, we need to own up to our extremist theology instead of always reverting to a strategy of denial, deflection and demonization."
Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was close friends with her colleague Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002.
At the summit, Obama and other officials insisted there is no link between Islam and the Islamist extremist groups that have been at the forefront of a dramatic spike in terrorist violence worldwide.
You can read the full story here.
