Jihadist Appeasement Is A Losing Strategy
David French writes at NRO that we need to stop seeing jihadists as something akin to multi-culti ivy league faculty members:

We see President Obama himself remarking in Cairo that "much has been made that an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected president." As if this crude racial bean-counting could make jihadists stand down in the same way it helps vacate student protesters from the dean's office. Do they not know that "young Pakistani Muslims" are colorblind? They happily slaughter even Muslim neighbors who look just like them (with names that sound just like theirs), if those neighbors aren't sufficiently faithful.

But it's not just the identity politics, it's also the self-loathing, the belief that our own actions are the indispensable fuel for the "extremist" fire.

Obama in Cairo:

We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year...

French continues:

Once again, this is "get the kids out of the office" thinking. But jihadists don't think like rebellious Dartmouth students or their faculty cheerleaders. For the psychopaths of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hamas, Hezbollah, (you name the group), Gitmo is a joke. Abu Ghraib is meaningless. Even after Abu Ghraib, jihadists would strongly prefer to surrender to American troops than our Iraqi allies, confident in our good treatment. But it didn't make them hate us less. We were hit on 9/11 before anyone outside the U.S. military could locate Gitmo on a map and after President Clinton had exerted such herculean effort to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that he hosted a known terrorist in the White House more than any other foreign leader. That didn't make our enemy hate us less.

...Jihadist Islam is violently expansionist to its very core -- and its enemies are simply defined as anyone and everyone (regardless of faith) who doesn't submit. Moreover, jihadist Islam isn't some kind of historical aberration, a unique phenomenon created as a byproduct surrounding the (very brief) period of colonialism in the Middle East. It's part of the historical DNA of the faith itself, with periodic waves of jihad sweeping out from the Islamic world since its founding. That's just a fact. And while jihadists tend to focus on the enemy right in front of their face (the Christians, Jews, or Muslims next door), they can and do multi-task -- trying to paralyze and intimidate the great powers who have the strength to crush their movement.

Jihad existed before modern Israel.

Jihad existed before America.

Jihad existed before even Great Britain.

So, no, it is not rooted in our supposed national sins, the Sykes-Picot agreement, or in the failure of the two-state solution. It's ultimately rooted in a single, primal religious drive: To conquer until all the world bends the knee. That's not nihilism. It's fanaticism. And these fanatics don't care one bit about the race or ideology of our president. But they do care about our strength or weakness. And now, Americans should (once again) see that weakness means death.