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Obama Deploys New Logo to Defeat ISIS
Chafing under criticism that they aren’t taking the threat from ISIS seriously, the State Department has launched an initiative to bring the barbarian terrorists to heel. Foregoing crude tactics like the threat of force or aggressive diplomacy, the Obama Administration has returned to what it knows best. They have created a logo:
This doesn’t offend me as an American; it offends me as a graphic designer. That is a rough-looking pile of clip art. But if the seven fonts and eight colors prove insufficient to scare away the jihadists, State also has a blog post outlining their strategy to defeat Islamist terror solve violent extremism.
Their detailed plan? To ask commenters for suggestions:
This week, the White House hosted a Summit to Counter Violent Extremism to highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence. These efforts have become even more imperative in light of recent, tragic attacks throughout the world. At the Summit, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “Our goal today is to take this chance to think broadly about how to prevent violent ideologies from taking hold, and how to prevent terrorist networks…from linking up with aggrieved groups elsewhere, and how to prevent them from thereby expanding their influence.”
Secretary Kerry described this effort as the “the defining fight of our generation” and a task not just for governments but everyone, including civil society, the faith community, foundations and philanthropists, and the private sector. The Secretary urged the Summit participants to provide their ideas and suggestions on how we can counter violent extremism, and we ask you:
What solutions do you think are most critical to countering violent extremism?
We are so screwed.
If you would like to submit your ideas to the team that shipped James Taylor to Paris, here’s the link. But if you advocate a solution that requires a carrier group instead of MS Paint, get ready for a detailed IRS audit. The Obama administration might wear kid gloves when dealing with the Islamic State, but they’ll switch to brass knuckles for domestic critics.
Published in General
A prominent feature of Anglosphere humour is irony (not bronzey or goldy). That logo would look boss on the side of US missiles and artillery shells.
Patience everyone, Obama has a new idea for combating EXTREMISM! They have taken to Twitter for suggestions! That should work right???
I can’t comment anymore, COC and all that…..
Posting about terrorists or Obama also challenges my willpower . . .
Obama was not tenured. That would have been an affirmative action bridge too far.
Mr. Law is correct. He didn’t have the qualifications to go tenure track. He was a special lecturer. If he had been tenured, the logo would have been much better. Tenured professors’ work needs to be publishable to the academy. No editor would let this drivel pass. Too insipid and naïve. Not nearly intellectually pretentious enough.
“Partner” segment looks like a cage or the rear end of an 18 wheeler. Either way, this output has the feeling of undergrad sociologists having been locked in a brainstorming session.
So essentially, it’s hugs. Not enough hugs…its all so obvious now.
That advanced? Looks more like the output of a bunch of teachers’ aides for an elementary school spirit board.
Jon;
Not to point out the obvious, but that is what I’m doing, these ‘brilliant’ designers appear to think this isn’t about people but their idea of a logo is a bunch of inanimate objects? No people? I guess people are the problem and buildings and benches are the solution?
Almost all of the current administrations efforts are to be ‘inclusive’ so graphically they can’t actually show anyone lest we don’t get diverse enough, so their world is one large bathroom graphic person or in this case buildings.
At least pajama boy could easily be mocked, power point graphics just aren’t worth the trouble and maybe that was the whole idea, this is an exact reflection of their policy, worthless. Yeah… we’re screwed with this level of clueless.
BTW- anyone notice that this graphic is a mirror of their America? Folks we are the problem and I’d warn everyone, the new DHS report says we are the problem so don’t be surprised if the NSA is already tracking all the Ricochetti. Have a nice day!
Which is no different from the disconnect during the Bush administration which assumed that we could win their “hearts and minds” if only we brought them democracy, and then everything would flourish and be fine.
The disconnect I find amazing is how “conservatives”…either in a deliberate attempt to score cheap political points, or because they…truly…have no idea what is actually going on (which is what happens when you only read conservative blogs and echo chambers)…keep repeating the same line over and over that the US is doing “nothing” to fight ISIS or Islamic terrorism…despite the massive bombings, despite the massive support for our allies fighting them, despite the…thousands or tens of thousands of terrorists killed…
…and simply try and cherry-pick from speeches and PR campaigns as if that’s the only reality that is relevant.
Now, if this is truly out of ignorance, than that can easily be fixed
If this is out of malice, then I’d like to point out another disconnect between the “conservative” position that you’re not supposed to criticize the President in a time of war, and today.
But, we’ve seen this play out in 1999 before. Disgracefully undermining the US in the eyes of the world, for cheap political points.
PS: The other great disconnect, of course comes about from this…cheap…political strategy that “conservatives” have decided to undertake in recent months, that despite the fact that almost every action, almost every word that this President has said…is the same as what the US has done and said for decades…they are now “cowardice and treachery and weakness and leading from behind”, when prior to this, they were “the greatest thing since sliced cheese”.
So we get to the juvenile middle school-ish word games of he said she said: why doesn’t Obama say Islam is the problem! Why doesn’t Obama say this…or say that…
Well, for the same reason neither did Bush.
Here’s Bush- Heroic!
” Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion.”
Here’s Obama – Traitor!
“This great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence”
Are we sure this isn’t The Onion?
Hmmn, are we sure this whole administration isn’t an Onion parody?
It’s a good thing we’re done with that nation-building approach that the Bush administration engaged in …
That isn’t the argument here. The argument is that the approach is doomed to fail because it is rooted in a lie about reality.
Also demonstrably false–in fact, falsified by the OP which you purport to comment on.
Moreover, actions and beliefs cannot be separated. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, if I sling a stone at Goliath with the intent to kill him, I’m not doing the same as if I sling a stone at Goliath with the intent to show off my stones. One is a serious attempt to solve a problem; the other is self-aggrandizing theater.
Conservatives were annoyed with Bush when he did it, but he canceled it out with the more defiant “axis of evil” type talk.
That said, the Obama administration has taken it much further, and exacerbated it with their academic, wishy-washy talk.
Apart from the fact that the administration is by-and-large just allowing the world to burn so it can continue talks with Russia and Iran, the way they talk makes no sense and is clearly not coming from any sort of coherent policy. The administration says it’s against nation building, but want to empower communities. It says war is not an answer, but says our only interactions with the area should be with drone-guided bombs. In practice this works out to the sort of half-asked effort approach Clinton took (blow stuff up, try to hand over the country to someone, leave, repeat) that doesn’t really create either stability or good-will towards the US.
Many people on the Right criticized the Bush administration’s often weak approach to the middle-east (the failure to preserve order in Iraq during the invasion, allowing the Afghanistan constitution to encode blasphemy laws, the failure to keep Pakistan from supporting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, etc), but that doesn’t mean they can’t criticize the Obama administration MORE, especially since the Obama administration came in without the wisdom the Bush administration slowly gained over its 8 years (their response to Ukraine probably have benefited from their failure during the Georgia invasion) and they seem incapable of learning those same lessons.
I wonder if Obama would agree with you that “almost every action, almost every word that this President has said…is the same as what the US has done and said for decades.” I expect he would say he was never so insulted.
The Obama war doctrine seems to be:
What we call the enemy is not a juvenile debate, nor is it a semantic disagreement. It is actually an argument about who and what the enemy is. If the enemy is motivated by religion, we cannot deal with him as if he is motivated by money or politics. This failure to understand the nature of the enemy makes it difficult to win. As Sun Tzu said in his Art of War:
Obama’s refusal to call the enemy what they so clearly are shows that he does not know who they are. They are religious fanatics. They will not be swayed by strategies that would work on reasonable people.
I fear that Obama’s failure to understand the Iranian dictatorship will also lead to catastrophe in the nuclear negotiations, as they are also religious fanatics, and Obama doesn’t get this. His failure to understand Putin will lead to catastrophe in Europe, starting with Ukraine. His failure to understand the Palestinians will make it more difficult for Israel to avoid catastrophe.
Finally, as Sun Tzu warned, there is Obama’s failure to understand himself. He believes he is smarter than everyone else. He is not. To paraphrase him, he is not a better general than his generals. He definitely is not a man who surrounds himself with top-flight intellects. In this way he can be smarter than his sycophants, but he deludes himself when he thinks he is smarter than the dictators who have his measure.
According to those Pinkos over at Slate:
As much as I would like to dump on the current administration on dodging the war with “Islam” extremists, there is no way no how that they can use it. The slightest hint of war with Islam would be used as a propaganda tool around the world.
But these guys on our side are the smartest guys ever. They keep searching for the correct formulation. ISIS knows the score and must laugh.
Educate? Engage? Mentor??? Where are: Identify, Locate, Kill!?
I like it.
What is the intended audience for this propaganda?
To the extent the US is the audience, I’ll replace it with a single slogan: “Knock it off!”
Knock it off to the imams preaching Jihad.
Knock it off to the public school teachers still operating under Soviet orders to propagandize against the US. Well before WW2, children in the US (whether immigrant or not) got great educations. Immigrants were reminded that there was a reason they or their parents left the old country for a better place. For the last 40 years or so, and with ever-increasing absurdity, kids have been told that the US, or greater civilized world, is so evil (and that the savages of the world are so good) that Jihad is justified.
Thus, we have several interesting phenomena. In the long past, children of immigrants assimilated fully. Consider “the greatest generation” which contained a large number of children of the Ellis Island era immigrants. Now, not so much. Lacking personal knowledge of what bad places their ancestral homelands are, they are prone to Jihad. We similarly have the “going native” phenomenon of Johnny Taliban etc.
Although the general destruction of our educational institutions by the left is also relevant, the left is only likely to damage education further with blather like this program.
To the extent that the audience is foreign, they should also knock off the anti-US propaganda. Third world hell-holes are that way due to their own bad cultures and governance. Knock off the blaming of the civilized world. The same goes for our first world friends. For too long, certain first world countries have tried to elevate their own moral standing or obtain advantage in the third world by propagandizing against other first world countries, namely the US and Israel.
BTW, how is this “White House Summit” going to dispel the belief that the US is a bunch of brain dead narcissists seeking to make everything about us?
I disagree. We are waaaay past the point where making them like us is going to help a damn thing. If they don’t use that against us they will just use something else no matter what we say. The term “violent extremists” don’t sound like an attempt to use semantics with a wink to our side….this administration is trying like hell to convince us this is what they actually believe. Like liberals do with most things, these idiots have begun with a conclusion and then try to twist what they can to match it and ignore the things that don’t.
How about we use this as a ‘if you ain’t with us, you’re against us” moment? Encourage the moderates in the Muslim world to pick a side instead of inviting them to groveling summits. Egypt’s leader seems to be coming to the realization that the rest of the world is sick of radical islamists. Maybe the best thing isn’t “understanding” at this point but a blatant choice for Muslims. You can’t be a part of the civilized world if you continue to make excuses for or have sympathies for these barbarians. Instead, our government is making the excuses…….
Jon & All,
Regards,
Jim
That is a legitimate concern, and the reason talking about this has always been difficult. Though, it has less to do with the recruitment aspect (ISIS doesn’t need the US State Dept to get the message out that it’s building a new Caliphate), and more to do with the fact that we need the support of the Muslims in the region, and they will naturally be defensive if we criticize Islam.
A walking-on-eggshells approach would be accepted by quite a few on the right (though a good many would not be as kind to Obama for partisan reasons), but the general tone of the Obama administration is not that. The reason just about everyone in the world is moving away from the US is Obama’s blame-America-first style of diplomacy: he shows no strength and the favor he shows to countries is inversely proportional to how much they support the US.
This asinine CVE Summit (which as KC Mulville and The Scarecrow note on the first comments page, is a sign you have no idea what to do) is just the latest and most glaring example of this administration’s ineptitude.
Bummer, no ISIS pen pals for us. How are we going to communicate and get their insights about Downtown Abbey and Jane Austen?
Indeed, but if the State Department indicates in any way that the US is at war with Islam they would be confirming ISIS’ message to Muslims in the US:
“You don’t belong there, they will never accept or respect you, fight on our side because they have already declared war on you.”
How’s that for an action that actually makes America weaker? What is patriotic about demanding that the State Department do this? Anything at all? I can’t see it.
Absolutely. And if you need allies, it’s pretty crucial not to alienate them by something so easily avoided.
Every significant US ally in the Arab world (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi, Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco) has moved closer into alignment with the US’ broad agenda as a response to ISIS – this smoothed and made possible, at least in part, by the US’ stated position that it is not at war with Islam. (And, imho, by Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Another thing that was unpopular with the Right at home.)
Has the US stepped back from providing military and other assistance to these countries? (Or to Israel?) If you look at cold facts (dollars, planes, technology, military support) it has not.
Here’s the thing. The Republicans, like the Right wing everywhere, have a natural advantage wrt public perception when it comes to national security because they’re seen as tough, un-trusting and most importantly realistic. But that’s an advantage that the Republicans have ruthlessly squandered – and seem determined to keep squandering – by being so moonbat unrealistic. They’re undermining their own credibility as grown ups.
Many of the things I read on Ricochet may play well in the primaries, but honestly: to me they sound like crazy talk. America and the world will be far less safe than it is today if a US Administration is informed by these opinions or motivations. (And I don’t even think Obama has done such a stellar job. But it’s all relative.)
I’m not a US citizen, so it doesn’t per se matter what I think of the Right’s foreign policy approach – but a lot of undecided Americans may look at the situation in the world, listen to some comments made to a friendly network, and decide that it’s just not safe to give the kids the keys to the car. (The crash in Iraq still being fresh in their minds.)
That’s a real problem for a party that seems to increasingly require this kind of talk from competitors in its primaries.
I’m not defending the approach. It was a dumb approach when Bush did it, it’s a dumb approach now. But it’s the same approach.
Except it’s not.
How many “goliaths” have been killed by the drone attacks over the last few years and the recent bombings carried out but the US? Yeah.
So you want more “talk”?
So at worst you can say is they didn’t learn from Bush’s failures.
Agreed.
So again, we’re back to saying that at worst, he is repeating the same…ignorant…approach of Bush who thought that by bringing “democracy” to the ME, the underlying causes of terrorism would subside.
Saying the enemy is a religious fanatic is not the same thing as saying that the problem is…religion.
Which seems to be the only point that “conservatives” seem interested in making these days: why isn’t Obama calling out Islam as the problem?
Well, because there’s a few million Muslims fighting on…our side…
Right. So we’re back to my argument that…at best…this is the same failed approach as Bush.
The same approach that thought that giving Palestinians “democracy” would lead to flowery roses, instead of Hamas. The same argument that looking into the eyes of Putin you could see…goodness. The same approach that by giving power to Iranian proxies in Iraq, would lead to…well…I’m not sure Bush though that one out through all the way ;)