In his Friday New York Times column, David Brooks equated President Barack Obama's reluctance to smear an entire faith with Donald Trump's insistence that terrorist attacks "are central to Islam."
Trump's "attempt to ban Muslim immigration is an act of bigotry (applying the sins of the few to the whole group), which is sure to incite more terrorism," he argued. However, the president is also incorrect, because "[t]he people who commit these acts are inflamed by a version of an Islamist ideology."
"The problem," Brooks continued, "is that these two wrongs are feeding off each other":
Obama is using language to engineer a reaction rather than to tell the truth, which is the definition of propaganda. Most world leaders talk about Islamist terror, but Obama apparently thinks that if he uses the phrase “Islamic radicalism” the rest of us will be too dim to be able to distinguish between the terrorists and the millions of good-hearted Muslims who want only to live in fellowship and peace.
Worst of all, his decision to dance around an unpleasant reality is part of the enveloping cloud of political correctness that drives people to Donald Trump. Millions of Americans feel they can’t say what they think, or even entertain views outside the boundaries laid down by elites, and so are drawn to the guy who rails against taboos and says what he believes...
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