Jeffrey Goldberg on What President Obama Really Thinks About Radical Islam

Following up on his lengthy article, “The Obama Doctrine,” in March, earlier this week Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic on “What Obama Actually Thinks About Radical Islam.”  While in some ways the article seems more about how bad Donald Trump is (as James Taranto says at “Best of the Web,” “[e]verything is about Donald Trump these days”), when Mr. Goldberg gets around to saying what President Obama thinks about radical Islam in private, it’s a lot better than what the President says in public.  In fact, if the President said in public what he apparently thinks in private, Donald Trump would have fewer grounds to criticize the President.

Consider these quotes from Mr. Goldberg’s article this week:

“Early in his first term, Obama … delivered a speech in Cairo that was meant to reset relations with Muslims, but was also meant, he later told me, to challenge Muslims to cease manufacturing excuses for problems of their own making.  He told me recently, in reference to the Cairo speech, ‘My argument was this.  Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel.  We want to work to help achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting – problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.’”

“At one point, he [President Obama] suggested, to my surprise … that far too many Arab Muslims, in particular, have given themselves over to hatred and violence.”

“‘There is ... the need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society,’ Obama told me.”

The problem is that President Obama can’t seem to say these things in public.  Just as he is afraid of stirring up a nativist reaction among the American public by saying in public what he is telling Mr. Goldberg in private,¹ he apparently doesn’t think the Arab people can handle honesty from him either.  Back to Mr. Goldberg’s article:

“‘I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate,’ he said, ‘if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush.’”

It’s as if the President, almost condescendingly, is afraid that regular people, whether Americans or Arabs, will react as ignorant yahoos if he is honest with them.  The problem with such an approach, at least for Americans, is that, in failing to talk honestly with the American people, the President is encouraging, among some people, the very reaction that he is apparently trying to avoid by not speaking honestly.  And his approach doesn’t seem to be working all that well with Arabs, either.
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¹ This is from Jeffrey Goldberg’s article back in March:

“Obama modulates his discussion of terrorism for several reasons: He is, by nature, Spockian.  And he believes that a misplaced word, or a frightened look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could tip the country into panic.  The sort of panic he worries about most is the type that would manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia or in a challenge to American openness and to the constitutional order.”