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At least Marco Rubio didn’t answer the attacks in Paris by demanding that the United States accept only Christian refugees. He left that to Ted Cruz.
But given the Florida senator’s reputation in GOP circles as a foreign-policy wonk, it’s worth looking in some detail at just how ridiculous his response was.
“The attacks in Paris,” Rubio began, “are a wake-up call.” Forgive the pedantry, but this is among the stupidest clichés in politics. Wake-up calls are things you plan yourself because you want to be awoken from your slumber at a set time, usually by a hotel clerk. The Paris attack was a horrific surprise orchestrated by France’s enemies. It wasn’t a “wake-up call” unless you believe its ultimate author was France itself.
[h=4]RELATED[/h]The linguistic weirdness continues a couple of lines later. “This is not a geopolitical issue where they want to conquer territory and it’s two countries fighting against each other,” Rubio declared. “They literally want to overthrow our society and replace it with their radical, Sunni Islamic view of the future. This is not a grievance-based conflict. This is a clash of civilizations.” Notice that Rubio never explicitly defines who “they” are. According to the French government, the Islamic State perpetrated Friday’s attacks. Rubio, however, said what occurred in Paris is a “clash of civilizations.”
But ISIS isn’t a civilization.
In parts of Iraq and Syria, it’s a self-declared, though unrecognized, state. Elsewhere, it’s a network of terrorist groups linked by a common ideology. “Civilizations” are cultural groupings. In calling the Paris attack a “clash of civilizations,” Rubio evoked Samuel Huntington’s famed 1993Foreign Affairs essay of the same name. In that essay, Huntington defined “civilization” as “the broadest level of cultural identity people have.” And he suggested that the world contains “seven or eight” major ones: “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African.”
The obvious answer is that the Islamic State fights those who block its path to power, whether they are liberal democracies or not. It attacked Russia because Russia joined the war in Syria on Assad’s side. Although Moscow has focused many of its air strikes on other Syrian rebel groups, the Islamic State evidently now sees the Russians as a battlefield enemy. That’s also how it sees France, which in September expanded its air strikes against ISIS from Iraq to Syria. Just last week, France announced it was sending an aircraft carrier to launch raids against the organization from the Persian Gulf. ISIS specifically cited France’s participation in the “Crusader campaign” in Syria in its statement claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks.
Read more @: ISIS Is Not Waging a War Against Western Civilization
Its not a war on "western democracy", its not a war on "western civilization". Its a war on those who block ISISs' path to power.