How's All That 'Outreach' Workin' For You, Barry?

Robert Spencer contrasts "outreacher" Obama and "realist" Netanyahu:

[Obama] has again and again reached out to the Islamic world, assuring Muslim countries of his respect for Islam. Again and again he has been rudely rebuffed, but that has not stopped him from making the attempt again and again. After the death of Osama bin Laden, he claimed that Osama was “not a Muslim leader, but a mass murderer of Muslims.” Then he made sure to give this mass murderer of Muslims a solemn Islamic funeral.

John O. Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, summed up the Obama administration’s warmly positive stance toward Islam in an August 2009 address: “Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against `jihadists.’ Describing terrorists in this way–using a legitimate term, `jihad,’ meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal–risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself. And this is why President Obama has confronted this perception directly and forcefully in his speeches to Muslim audiences, declaring that America is not and never will be at war with Islam.”

That may be so, but Netanyahu’s statement is true as well – at least the first part of it: “Militant Islam threatens the world.” America is not and never will be at war with Islam, but a significant element of Islam is at war with America, Israel, and the rest of the free world – and Netanyahu is much more realistic about that fact than any other Western leader.

Update: O'Bama (his Oirish surname) reminds us that it's always easy to ask someone else to make a "wrenching compromise."