How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Harf?

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

Unlike “Maria,” the Julie Andrews’ character in The Sound of Music, you can’t describe State Department spokesperson Marie Harf as “a flibbertijibbet, a will-o’-the wisp, and a clown.” She is a Washington careerist with considerable experience as a policy analyst in the State Department. Nonetheless, she has become a laughingstock because of her comments about how the United States should deal with the ISIS terrorists. Her critics on the right are guffawing, while those on the left are lifting an eyebrow and looking for ways to change the subject.
I say don’t laugh at Harf. She is telling us a great deal about the thinking of the elites in government (when liberal Democrats are in control), the media, and the academic world. There are a lot of Marie Harfs in those circles. The only reason they are not rushing to her defense is because the public reaction to her choice of words about Islamic terrorists has been so unfavorable. Kirsten Powers’ comments on Fox News Sunday on February 22 are a case in point. The best she could come up with was that Harf expressed herself “inartfully” at an “inopportune time.”
Harf’s analysis took place on Chris Matthews’ program on MSNBC on February 16. She told Matthews that “We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s a lack of opportunity or jobs. We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.” Some wags have described her recommendation as a call for “jobs for jihadis.”
It may strike some as cruel to poke fun at Harf, who is still in her mid-thirties and comes across on camera as an overly earnest member of a high school debate team. But sometimes laughter is the best way to poke holes in a con job being perpetrated upon us by our government. What Harf is asking us to accept is not just her view of the politics of the Middle East. She was repeating Obama administration talking points on the Matthews’ program. She underscored them the next day on Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN, insisting that there is “no easy solution” to the terrorism being carried out by ISIS and that those who were mocking her lacked the ability to comprehend the “nuances” of her position.
What mainstream America needs to confront is that Harf’s view of America’s role in the world is not some quirk of hers and the Obama administration. It is what has been taught in the history and social science classes in American universities since the late 1960s, what former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “blame America first” view of the world. It is a combination of secularist, relativist, behaviorist, and new left revisionist theories about the pernicious influence of the United States in the world arena.
It begins with Rousseau’s teachings about the “natural goodness” of man. It is what leads to the behaviorist theory that muggers and street thugs in our country are products of deprived childhoods — and to Harf’s proposition that the ISIS murderers are spawned by the “lack of job opportunities” in the Arab street. It is a version of the “there is no such thing as a bad child” frame of mind brought into the world arena. It is why she wants to attack the “root causes” of the terrorists’ hatred for those who stand in the way of their dream of creating a new Caliphate.
It is the same confidence that leads advocates of the welfare state in the United States to think they can devise poverty programs and community action associations to rebuild crime-ridden neighborhoods and families in turmoil. The difference is that this time the liberal elites are targeting Muslim terrorists, rather than inner-city criminals, proposing, as Harf phrases it, to work with like-minded “reformers in countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies.”
Harf’s explanation for the turmoil in the Middle East is no different from what President Obama offered in the wake of the three-day summit on Countering Violent Extremism he organized in Washington in mid-February. Obama urged countries to “break the cycles of conflict, especially sectarian conflict” and called on governments to “address the grievances that terrorists exploit,” both political and economic.
“The link is undeniable. When people are oppressed and human rights are denied — particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines — when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism. It creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit.”
What Obama and Harf are giving us is a bumper-sticker version of the teachings of the new left historians that Obama grew up reading as a young radical. It is a world where great injustices have been perpetrated upon oppressed peoples by colonial governments seeking to use Third World countries as sources of raw materials and outlets for their manufactured goods.
Obama wrote openly of his admiration as a young man for the writings of Frantz Fanon, the black French radical who defended the right of colonized people to use what we would now call terrorist tactics to gain independence. There was a reason why one of the first things Obama did as president was to remove the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.
For the new left revisionist historians, America has been a flawed country from its very beginnings, a country established by slaveholders, racists, and sexists, one whose wealth was achieved through the exploitation of the non-white peoples of the world, starting with the land taken from Native Americans. It continues in our time at the expense of the Muslim populations of the oil rich nations of the Middle East.
Liberal behaviorists frequently employ rhetoric about the “criminal as a victim of society” when they analyze the “root causes” of crime in the United States. It is not a stretch to hold that Harf and Obama are depicting ISIS and the other Muslim terrorist groups as “victims” of the root causes of the social injustice brought to the Middle East by global capitalism. When they talk about “root causes” and the “the grievances that terrorists exploit” they are talking about problems that they are convinced white capitalists are responsible for creating.
That is why Obama, when first elected, went on his world “apology tour.” He was apologizing for the history of a country the new left radicals of his youth called “Amerika.”
By the way, throwing the spotlight on the left-wing currents that shaped Obama’s thinking about the United States is what Rudolph Giuliani should have done, rather question Obama’s “love for his country.” It does no good to raise that issue. Unabashed radicals — William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Al Sharpton, for example — would protest that they love America deeply, so much so that they want to transform it into a socialist utopia dedicated to the best interests of the American people.
What Obama does not love is the “system” that forged what he sees as the racist, militarist, sexist, American colonial superpower of the last half of the 20th century, the country he vowed to “fundamentally transform” when he was elected in 2008.