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When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al-Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq. We’ve entered the theatre of the absurd.

Last week the conservative columnist Rich Lowry wrote an essay in Politico that contained quotes from White House spokesman Josh Earnest that I could not believe. I was sure they were made up. But I checked the transcript: 100% correct. I can’t say it better than Lowry did:

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The recent outrages in Paris have caused the more discerning political leadership and commentariat in many countries to recognize that the Israelis are just a pretextual grievance, because they are in territory the Arabs claim as their own. (This is bunk, as the territory of Israel was always inhabited by some Jews and was previously governed by the British, Turks, Crusaders, Byzantines, Romans, and Jews, and never by Arabs, but that is almost beside the point.) The real enemy is the entire West, not just, or even particularly, Israel.

The associate publisher of the influential Paris newspaper Le Figaro wrote last week in an uplifting “Declaration” that a “new religious war on a planetary scale” has been declared. (The piece evokes Emile Zola’s seminal “J’Accuse” in Georges Clemenceau’s L’Aurore in 1898 during the Dreyfus Affair.) “Islamists massacre Christians in Egypt, Iraq, Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, all over, in fact,” he wrote. He predicted a “pitiless unleashing of a renascent Islam … by the immense Islamized masses of the Third World and our great metropolises,” motivated by a “hatred of Christianity (that) vastly exceeds all problems of faith. Attacking churches, priests, other religious personnel, and the faithful, Islamists wish to destroy Western civilization, democracy, capitalism, what they call ‘neo-colonialism,’ equality of the sexes, the Rights of Man, all progress as we conceive it. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin have been replaced (as enemies of the West) by Allah and the Prophet. Bellicose imams have taken the places of the political commissars … We weep with our usual crocodile tears for the Copts murdered in Egypt and Christians assassinated in Baghdad as the representatives of the West, European culture, capitalism, neo-colonialism, the dollar and Coca-Cola,” though they antedated the Muslims in the Nile Valley and Baghdad by five centuries, “but we sit by passively with folded arms.”