Yesterday Hot Air posted a story quoting White House press secretary John Earnest on the bombings and stabbings that occurred this weekend.
The Washington Free Beacon has the full quote:
“When it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle, and what ISIL wants to do is they want to project that they are an organization that is representing Islam in a fight and a war against the West, and a war against the United States,” he said. “That is a bankrupt, false narrative. It’s a mythology, and we have made progress in debunking that mythology.”
After laying out advances made militarily against ISIS, which the Obama administration calls ISIL, Earnest again repeated the U.S. had made progress in “debunking this mythology.”
“We can’t play into this narrative that somehow the United States or the West is fighting against the Muslim religion,” he said. “The fact is there are millions of patriotic Muslims in this country right now that make our country proud. They serve in our armed services. They serve in our law enforcement … These are individuals who make a substantial and positive contribution to our country, and that is an inconvenient fact for the ISIL narrative.”
This statement infuriates me. We have had to put soldiers back in Iraq because President Obama decided to unilaterally end the war. Those soldiers are not fighting a narrative–they are fighting real bullets.
The article at Hot Air tells us a few important things about the bombings in New York City on Saturday:
A top law enforcement official said the pressure cookers in the two bombs in Chelsea on Saturday night were filled with “fragmentation materials.” The bomb that exploded, at 23rd Street, was filled with small bearings or metal BBs. A second device on 27th Street that did not explode appeared to be filled with the same material, the official said…
At the same time, pressure cookers have been a container of choice for many improvised explosive devices over the years. They were used in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 based on a model in publications put out by Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
An expert on improvised explosive devices used by terrorists around the world said that a device constructed with a cellular phone as a timer and Christmas lights as an initiator would indicate a higher-than-average competence than what is usually found in the United States. “Most of what we see in the United States is a pipe bomb with black powder or smokeless powder or a simple hobby fuse,” said the expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he does sensitive work for government agencies. “This would be the high end of sophistication for I.E.D.s in the United States.”
The article at Hot Air also includes the irony that thieves prevented the second bomb from exploding:
The day Ahmad Khan Rahami allegedly planted two bombs in Chelsea — one of which detonated on West 23rd Street — two thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street, sources said.
The young men, who sources described as being well-dressed, opened the bag and took the bomb out, sources said, before placing the explosive into a garbage bag and walking away with the rolling suitcase.
In doing so, investigators believe they inadvertently disabled the explosive, sources said. That allowed investigators to examine the cellphone attached to the bomb intact and discover that it was connected to the family of Rahami.
This is not a narrative fight–this is a fight where people get injured and killed. It is time those in the Obama Administration realized that and admitted it.
