Cass Sunstein's wife speaks

Samantha Power Dives Deep…Into Incoherence

by John Hinderaker

Yesterday U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power delivered the Daniel Pearl Lecture at UCLA and met with Pearl’s parents. Afterward, she unburdened herself of this tweet:

"Daniel Pearl's story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence. @DanielPearlFNDN"

I saw this on Twitter late last night and pondered it for a while. What is it supposed to mean? I have no clue. Power refers to “individual accountability.” If by that she means tracking down and killing the people who slit Daniel Pearl’s throat, I am with her all the way. But somehow, I don’t think that is the accountability she has in mind.

Then there is “reconciliation.” Reconciliation between whom and whom? Al Qaeda and the families of people murdered by al Qaeda? Has anyone seen any sign of a longing for “reconciliation” among Muslim terrorists?

And finally we have the “cycles of violence” that need to be “broken.” What cycles of violence is Daniel Pearl’s murder a “reminder” of? Is Power suggesting that Pearl’s murder was carried out in retaliation against prior killings of al Qaeda terrorists by Wall Street Journal reporters? I don’t think so…but what “cycles of violence” she associates with Pearl’s beheading at the hands of terrorists, I can’t imagine.

Twitter lit up with ridicule of Power’s meditation on the significance of Pearl’s murder. One tweeter offered the simplest explanation: maybe she was on drugs. But she doesn’t seem the type. Rather, I think Samantha Power–who among fans of the Obama administration is considered a deep thinker!–suffers from the muddle-headedness that typifies most liberals. She can’t face the truth, which is that radical Muslims are an existential threat to civilization and freedom, with whom we can never be reconciled. So in lieu of truth, she emits platitudes about “cycles of violence” and so on. The sad reality is that her boss, Barack Obama, who has appointed her to a series of high-profile foreign policy positions, has just as incoherent a view of the world as she does.