Barack Obama lectures while Islamic State continues its slaughter

AGAINST a backdrop of brutality and bloodshed, the US holds a talkfest.

President Barack Obama speaks at the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.

LIKE an interfering school principal, Barack Obama kept a tight rein on dissent at his over-subscribed, unwieldy and oddly named “White House summit on countering violent extremism”.

The US President delivered not one but two speeches in which he obstinately hammered home his cherished theme that groups such as Islamic State (also known as ISIL) are neither religious in nature nor Muslim and therefore “all of us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like ISIL somehow represent Islam, ­because that is a falsehood that embraces the terrorist narrative”.

As proceedings got under way at the White House, and later the State Department, in sub-zero temperatures, Islamic State had just massacred 21 Egyptian Christian Copts on the Mediterranean shores of Libya, killed at least 45 in Iraq, harvested organs and killed the victims to finance its expansion plans and banned instruments it deemed un-Islamic.

Even Obama acknowledged the bizarreness of holding a Washington conference against a backdrop of such brutality and bloodshed.

“As we speak, ISIL is terrorising the people of Syria and Iraq and engaging in unspeakable cruelty,” he told delegates.

“The wanton murder of children, the enslavement and rape of women, threatening religious min­orities with genocide, beheading hostages. ISIL-linked terrorists murdered Egyptians in the Sinai Peninsula, and their slaughter of Egyptian Christians in Libya has shocked the world. Beyond the region, we’ve seen deadly attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, Paris and now Copenhagen.”

Yet instead of convening a military planning meeting to discuss how to counter the threat from the self-styled caliphate in Iraq, Syria and now Libya, and its former allies in al-Qaida, there was a three-day talkfest in the US capital culminating in Thursday’s official assembly of ministers, police and law enforcement ­figures, business leaders and civil society representatives from more than 60 countries.

Panel discussions closed to the media and outside observers included “cultivating economic opportunity for communities vulnerable to radicalisation and recruitment to violence” — this even though Islamic State is a historically fabulously rich, territorially expansionist movement worth billions of dollars — and “building secure and resilient communities that reject and condemn violent extremism”.

“We must address the griev­ances that terrorists exploit, including economic grievances,” Obama said several times, in a strong ­reminder of his community ­organiser past.

Playing the feel-good preacher, he urged people of all beliefs and backgrounds to “share the truths of our faiths with each other”.

Even before the summit, harsh criticism had been coming from all sides of the political spectrum, including Republicans and some Democrats, over Obama’s apparent unwillingness to directly call out Islamic or, even better, Islamist extremism as the conference’s chief concern.

A growing group of academics and terrorism analysts are equally worried by Washington’s ignorance of the fundamentally theological and religious as well as totalitarian ideological nature of Islamic State.

Yet still Obama insisted these figures are “not religious leaders, they are terrorists”. The words were soothing balm for the ministerial delegations flocking from the Sunni regimes of the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, which are to a large degree responsible for the ideological backbone of Islamic State and al-Qaida.

At the close of proceedings the United Arab Emirates delegation trumpeted: “We must stop referring to Daesh as the Islamic State — it is neither Islamic nor a state.” So much for a summit that ­descended into an endless definitional debate.

Still, the Muslim nation delegations were often far franker in their assessments of the cancer tearing apart their nations and their religion.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said the doctrine of kaffir that targets infidels and “bad Muslims” for gory death was “an affront against Islam. It is Muslims who are the main victims of this terrorism.” However, “the responsibility of confronting the terrorists lies with Muslim themselves”. These words were far tougher than anything the President uttered.

Listening to the endless speechifying, it was impossible not to think of another age of appeasement when Europeans and Americans talked and talked about the threat from Nazism but did little to counteract it.

Half-Munich conference (when Britain’s appeasing prime minister Neville Chamberlain came back from Nazi Germany waving a peace of white paper and declaring “peace for our time”) and half-Evian conference (the shameful 1938 meeting in France where the world outside of Germany decided it could do nothing to help Jewish refugees), the summit amounted to an academic conference attended by some of the world’s most powerful ministers busily organising their own bilateral meetings on the sidelines.

One Pakistani journalist told me she was confronted by the Danish foreign minister and French interior minister’s “hardline” stance and wanted them to promise they would crack down harder on publications such as Charlie Hebdo that deliberately provoked Muslims with cartoons of the prophet.

At least US National Security Adviser Susan Rice, in her closing address, said: “We cannot advance our cause by suppressing ideas or curtailing speech. Offensive speech must be met with more speech.”

For reasons unclear to most of the world, Obama seems singularly obsessed with reassuring US Muslims and their fellow believers around the world that neither Washington nor the West generally is at war with Islam. But what about confronting anti-Semitism?

A conference that discusses extremism, and if not expressly but in substance focuses on Islamist radicalism, but does not tackle front-on the scourge of hatred of Jews has clearly missed an essential point.

The constructive results that will emerge from this conference will of course come from the ­unreported and off-the-record meetings between ministerial ­delegates such as the constructive bilateral meetings between ­Attorney-General George Brandis and the Danish foreign minister on counter-terrorism co-operation between Canberra and Copenhagen.

Peter Neumann, director of the Britain-based Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, delivered one of the best addresses, notable for its careful unpacking of the multifaceted face of Islamo-fascist radicalism, and admission that this was a war against ideas that simply couldn’t be won by cracking down on radical online posts.

“There has been a lot of talk about taking content off the internet and that may be a part of the solution but we also need to spend more time, energy and effort thinking of ways we can engage and challenge extremist ideas,” Neumann said.

“Everything I see (being proposed) is great but it is a drop in the ocean. The internet is the most ­powerful tool and we have handed over that powerful tool to the ­extremists.”