Obama Likens Islamic State to Joker From 'Batman' Comics
U.S. President Barack Obama has reportedly compared the Islamic State terror group to the Joker from the Batman comic book series.
Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Obama Doctrine" that the president compared the ISIS (also known as ISIL, IS) terrorist organization to the Joker in the 2008 film "The Dark Knight."
"There's a scene in the beginning in which the gang leaders of Gotham are meeting," Goldberg quotes the president as telling his advisers.
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"These are men who had the city divided up. They were thugs, but there was a kind of order. Everyone had his turf. And then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire. ISIL is the Joker. It has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That's why we have to fight it," the president reportedly said.
As Goldberg reports, one Obama adviser also described ISIS as a "flash in the pan," and the president told The New Yorker in 2014 that the terrorist organization is like the "jayvee team" in the Middle East.
"The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant," Obama told David Remnick of The New Yorker two years ago.
The president then defended his comments in an interview with "Meet the Press" in 2014, saying he wasn't referring to the Islamic State specifically as being a "jayvee team," but rather the network of smaller jihadist groups based in Iraq and Syria.
"Keep in mind I wasn't specifically referring to (Islamic State)," Obama told host Chuck Todd. "I've said that, regionally, there were a whole series of organizations that were focused primarily locally, weren't focused on homeland, because I think a lot of us, when we think about terrorism, the model is Osama bin Laden and 9/11."
Some have accused the Obama administration of not taking the threat of the Islamic State seriously.
The Commander-in-Chief said in January 2016, during his final State of the Union address, that the Islamic State should not be considered an "existential threat" to the United States.
"Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence," the president said at the time.
"We don't need to build them up to show that we're serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that (IS) is representative of one of the world's largest religions. We just need to call them what they are — killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed," the president said.
