After the brutal execution of the American journalist James Foley, President Obama issued a statement decrying the brutality and viciousness of the so-called Islamic State. “From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread.” Obama said, “There has to be a clear rejection of these kind (sic) of nihilistic ideologies.” Nihilistic, you say? That’s an interesting and unfortunate appellation, to say the very least.
Tellingly, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a statement the same day, also referring to the Islamic State as “nihilistic.” Clearly, the administration has consciously chosen to attack the ideology behind the radical Islamism for its nihilism. And lest you think that this is a partisan phenomenon, Republicans, too, have long bemoaned the nihilism of the Islamists. Indeed, just after 9/11, the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer charged al Qaeda with a “worship of death and destruction [that] is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis….”
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