What Did Vladimir Putin, Who Is Nothing Like Obama, Say About Forgiving Terrorists?

18 Nov, 2015 by Scott McKay

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Barack Obama’s response to the recent rash of terrorist attacks emanating from the burgeoning Islamic caliphate arising in parts of Syria and Iraq hasn’t been particularly robust. In fact, based on recent comments since being humiliated on Friday by the Paris terror attacks on the same day he claimed ISIS had been “contained” he seems more interested in throwing bombs at his Republican critics than dropping them on the global jihad.

Peter Wehner at Commentary put it well…

If only the president could summon up this much passion and anger against oh, say, the Islamic State. Or the malevolent regimes of Iran and Syria. But no; it’s theRepublicans for whom Mr. Obama has special antipathy. What a lovely touch, too, using soldiers who are paralyzed and without limbs to try to shut his critics down. And since we’re dealing with Obama, there is the requisite “my critics are playing political games while my motives are as pure as the new-driven snow.”

By now it’s all quite predictable and quite tiresome. Even the president’s own peculiar psychological habits – his tendency to project, his narcissism and seething resentment in reaction to criticisms, his inability to see reality when reality conflicts with his rigid and dogmatic views – are tedious because they are so commonly on display.

Watching Mr. Obama deal with his manifold and multiplying failures is to watch a man grow more bitter and graceless by the day. It’s a long, long way from hope and change.

That’s Obama, and he’s our problem here in America. In Russia, dealing with their own deadly terrorist incident in which an ISIS bomb in Egypt took down a passenger plane full of vacationers headed home to Moscow they’ve got lots of problems. But at the moment, a lack of moral clarity from their premier Vladimir Putin is not one of them.

What Putin did not say, unfortunately, is the quote attributed to him…

“To forgive the terrorists is up to god, to send them to him is up to me.”

Russia Today host Remi Maalouf tweeted the quote, which he later admitted he found in a Facebook post attributed to Putin and confirmed it was not accurate.

But here’s what Putin did say after the bombing of that passenger plane, which while it doesn’t quite rise to the level of apocryphal toughness reminiscent of Denzel Washington’s character in the 2004 classic Man On Fire, was still something beyond Obama’s testicular reach…

This is not the first time Russia experiences barbaric terrorist crime, usually without any obvious internal or external causes, the way it was with the explosion at the railway station in Volgograd at the end of 2013. We remember everything and everyone.

The murder of our people over Sinai is one of the bloodiest crimes in terms of the lives it claimed. We will not dry our tears – this will remain forever in our hearts and minds. However, this would not stop us from finding and punishing the perpetrators.

We have to do it without any period of limitation; we need to know all their names. We will search wherever they may be hiding. We will find them anywhere on the planet and punish them.