In her infamous lecture about “smart power” in 2014, Hillary Clinton said that American leaders must “understand” and “empathize” with Islamic terrorists. She has the empathy down but not the understanding.

She still can’t grasp the obvious theological motivation of the Islamic terrorists, which comes not from what they read in American newspapers but from what they read in the Koran and the Hadith. Whether American leaders are praising or condemning Islam is irrelevant to them. For almost sixteen years, America’s feckless political class, which Hillary epitomizes, has fostered the delusion that if leaders just spoke more soothingly about Islam its militancy would dissipate. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama fatuously declared that America is not at “war with Islam” even as it leading imams declared war on America. Bush and Obama talked endlessly about Islam as a religion of peace. Meanwhile, the terrorist tentacles of Islam just grew longer and longer.

After every eruption of Islamic terrorism, Americans have been instructed by the ruling class’s propagandists not to see it as evidence of a “religious war.” But it is a religious war, with the exception that only one side is fighting it. In Hillary’s flailing and stale claim that rhetorical intemperance is provoking Islamic terrorism, ISIS can take true comfort, insofar as it signals yet another white flag in the war. Nothing encourages an enemy more than the prospect of victory against a weak opponent.

In a warbling Hillary, clinging desperately to the clichés of a failed political class, Americans see little “resolve” and a lot of “fear.” Anybody wondering what her administration would look like just had to watch the pathetic response of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and New York governor Andrew Cuomo to last weekend’s terrorist attack. Looking like a tranquilized giraffe, de Blasio surveyed the scene and concluded that it revealed evidence of “intentional” behavior but not terrorism, while a casually dressed Cuomo bumptiously asserted that it did not point to “international terrorism.” Anybody wondering what the priorities of her administration would be just had to read the New York Times on the day of the attack, which featured a story about “hate crimes against American Muslims.”

Accompanying the story was a picture of a funereal scene, with the caption: “People waited for the coffin of one of two men, an imam in Queens and his assistant, who were shot dead last month.” Given that those murders haven’t been declared hate crimes, it was an absurdly biased photo to select to illustrate the story. The Times just reports breezily near the second half of the piece: “Last month, an imam in Queens and his assistant were shot and killed execution-style on the sidewalk. The authorities have charged a 35-year-old man in the attack but have not determined a motive or whether it should be treated as a hate crime.”

The story is full of biased hedges, sources, and information so incomplete as to be meaningless. It is a story about an “apparent increase” in hate crimes that are “apparently fueled by terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad and by divisive language on the campaign trail,” with “some scholars” believing that Donald Trump is responsible for it. The story has all the objectivity of a press release from CAIR.

Straining to make this supposed spike in Trump-fueled hate crimes sound menacing, the Times reports that somebody back in May claimed that a Trump supporter once “reportedly poured liquid on a Muslim woman” in Washington, D.C. We’re not told what the liquid was (water?) or if there was any proof or resolution to the complaint. On such shaky and fragmentary information, the Times alleges a “problem” and then tells us that “researchers say” the lack of proof of hate crimes is itself proof of them and even proof that the problem is greater than anyone can fathom, since “victims are often reluctant to report attacks for fear of inflaming community tensions, and because it is sometimes difficult for investigators to establish that religious, ethnic or racial hatred was a cause.”

Such are the preoccupations of Hillary’s envisioned America, where the ruling class extends empathy to every culture except its own. No sooner had the Islamic terrorist been caught on Monday than she and her supporters resumed their babble about cultural relativism. Cuomo hit the airwaves to warn against the loss of “American values,” as if the founding fathers shared his blindness to the militancy of Islam. Hillary surrogates criticized Trump for not appreciating the terrorist’s right to the best hospitals and attorneys. And then there was the usual prattle about “partnering” with Muslim leaders who renounce violence. When Trump did, meeting with the Egyptian president at the United Nations this week, that was dismissed too.

All of the spinning was designed to distract the public from the fact that Islamic terrorism spread under Obama’s policies and Hillary promises more of the same. It is in the porousness of political correctness that Islamic terrorists see their path to America and find their greatest comfort — the comfort of knowing they can actually win.