They execute captured prisoners. They kill children. They enslave, rape, and force women into marriage" (Obama, 2014). By informing the American people of the atrocities ISIS has committed, President Obama is not taking the popular way of shielding the American public. Upon thinking about ISIS many westerners assume that since it stands for the Islamic State that the leaders are Muslims who practice Islam. However, in his speech, Obama addressed the fourth standard by taking away the blame from Muslims when he said, "Now let's make two things clear: ISIL is not 'Islamic'. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL's victims have been Muslim" (Obama, 2014). Hopefully, President Obama's words were powerful enough to remove any preconceived notions about the Islamic religion. Obama's words also exhibit many characteristics seen in Huxley's "Propaganda in a Democratic Society.".
In his essay, Huxley creates an analogy strikingly similar to President Obama's speech on ISIS when he said, "Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed completely self-evident that the bad old days were over, that torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics, were things of the past. Among people who wore top hats, traveled in trains, and took a bath every morning such horrors were simply out of the question. After all, we were living in the twentieth century. A few years later these people who took daily baths and went to church in top hats were committing atrocities on a scale undreamed of" (para. 2). This quote by Huxley is very similar to when Obama said ISIS is a "Jayvee team" (which means a team that isn't very good) and that he believed there was a clear "distinction between the capacity and reach of a Bin Laden network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes" (Schwartz, 2014, p.
