Rejecting ‘Radical Islam,’ Obama Rejects Reality

After a meeting with the National Security Council to discuss the Orlando massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in American history, Barack Obama was angry. He's more impassioned than we've ever seen him. He was speaking from the heart. He’s lashing out! Because you know what really grinds his gears? Republicans.
“That’s the key, they say,” Obama said, eviscerating the GOP. “We can't defeat them unless we call them radical Islamists. What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?”
A lot, actually.
As a matter of realpolitik, perhaps it makes sense to avoid the phrase “radical Islam.” We don’t want to offend the Mullahs, theocratic sheiks, oligarchic princes, Arab strongmen, and future junta leaders of the Middle East. We need to work with these people, after all. What should bother you, though, is that Obama constantly tries to chill speech by insinuating that anyone who does associate violence with radical Islam—which includes millions of adherents—is a bigot. This is a president who also intimates that anyone who is critical of everyday Islam’s widespread illiberalism—for example, all nations where homosexuality is punishable by death are Muslim—is also a bigot.
It’s not as if Obama shies away from lecturing people about faith. Saying the words “radical Islam” is a step too far, but bringing up events from the year 1095 to create a tortured moral equivalence is just fine. Not only has Obama implored us to avoid critical rhetoric about Islam, but he demands that Americans (secular apostates like myself included) act as if all faiths are equally tolerant of our lives. This is the president who tells the world that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Can you imagine Obama going to the United Nations General Assembly and declaring the same for Jesus Christ?
Exempting Islam from discourse is to place Muslims outside the norms of American debate.
Nor has Obama hesitated to lecture Christians, who supposedly use religious freedom as an “excuse” for “discrimination,” to evolve and abandon their antiquated ways. After years of propaganda equating evangelicals with Islamic fundamentalists (who aren’t the true adherents of Islam, according to pundits who’ve probably never read a single book about the faith), many liberals make no distinction between the two anymore. For them, supporting the idea sex-specific bathrooms is only a small step from massacring gay Americans. This is what denial of reality can do to a society. You can see it all manifesting in liberal punditry.