Just the other day, Hillary Clinton told a half-empty auditorium in Georgetown that her vision of “smart power” included empathizing with America’s enemies and respecting them.
Presumably that includes the murderers of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his defenders, whose death Hillary lied remorselessly about for political reasons – telling relatives of the dead that she’d spare no effort to bring down the creator of the YouTube video she falsely blamed for the attack in Benghazi, long after it was absolutely clear the action was a terrorist attack. She certainly didn’t have much respect or empathy for American citizens who wanted to get to the bottom of that attack, famously dismissing inquiries with a brusque “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Presumably it also includes the al-Qaeda scumbags in Yemen who just murdered American hostage Luke Somers and South African hostage Pierre Korkie during a rescue attempt, staged by American special forces because it was believed his execution was imminent. Let’s hear all about your “respect” for these guys, Hillary. Tell us all about how we must empathize with their point of view. Or you could shut the hell up and stop wasting America’s time with your absurd cash grab disguised as a proto-presidential campaign.
Somers was a British-born photojournalist with American citizenship who was kidnapped off the streets of the Yemeni capital a year ago. Korkie was, like so many of the mighty jihad army’s other hostages, an aid worker whose “crime” was giving part of his life to help Muslims in need. A previous rescue attempt two weeks ago came heartbreakingly close to freeing Somers, resulting in the death of seven al-Qaeda thugs and freeing eight hostages, but unfortunately Somers had been moved to a different location shortly before that raid began. This time he was at the location hit by U.S. Navy SEALs, but died in the firefight with his captors.
As CNN reports, al-Qada enjoyed jerking Somers’ desperate family around, using their hostage as a prop in a video where he pleaded for his life, and they threatened to kill him in three days unless their demands were met:
Somers appeared in the AQAP video asking for help and identifying himself.
“My name is Luke Somers. I’m 33 years old. I was born in England, but I carry American citizenship and have lived in America for most of my life,” he said.
Somers’ brother and mother posted a response video to YouTube in which they pleaded with the militants to spare him.
His brother, Jordan Somers, asked the militants not to fault Somers or his family for the previous rescue attempt.
“He is not responsible for any actions that the U.S. government has taken. Please understand that we had no prior knowledge of the rescue attempt for Luke, and we mean no harm to anyone,” Jordan Somers said.
The American hostage was dressed in a nice shirt in the militant video and at least appeared clean and healthy. This did not escape his mother.
Paula Somers thanked them for taking good care of him in the family’s response video, but also asked her son be returned to her alive.
“Please show mercy and give us an opportunity to see our Luke again. He is all that we have,” she said.
Who wants to “respect” and “empathize with” people who would do something like that? Barbarism is defeated only by resisting it with unflagging vigor, making it clear that savagery is failed strategy with no possible reward. Concessions and legitimacy are what barbarians crave, and that’s what Hillary’s “Smart Power” theories offer them. She peddles this garbage as a means of delivering a backhanded slap to her domestic political adversaries, implying they are brutish, insensitive, and parochial because they cannot comprehend her multi-spectrum approach to global problem-solving, but she ends up making herself look like a fool – precisely the sort of ivory-tower academic turkey America’s adversaries can’t wait to pluck and grill.
We need an improvement over Barack Obama’s disastrous foreign policy, not someone so awful that she makes Obama look halfway competent by comparison. Obama’s statement on the deaths of Somers and Korkie included a straightforward denunciation of the murders as a “barbaric” demonstration of “the depths of al-Qaeda’s depravity,” so it doesn’t sound like he’s on board with Hillary’s Smart Power doctrine of respect and empathy.
Mind you, Obama’s often vapid and disconnected response to these outrages is only a marginal improvement, including his relentless efforts to portray al-Qaeda and ISIS evil as a “wrong side of history” aberration that will soon collapse on its own, without any great effort from him; or as a violation of the core tenets of the Religion of Peace, which he went so far as to claim was less likely to murder co-religionists than the world’s other faith traditions, following the beheading of Muslim convert Peter Kassig (“ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.”)
But at least Obama consistently says that whatever he thinks the ideology of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda – which are growing chummy again after a long estrangement, including al-Qaeda’s evident interest in reproducing ISIS’ trademark hostage-beheading snuff films – happens to be, it’s categorically wrong, not something we need to understand and come to terms with.
You will never be the President of the United States, Hillary Clinton. America isn’t that far gone. Not yet, anyway.