Jon Stewart knocks Obama for letting Syria's Kobani fall to ISIS

Jon Stewart knocks Obama for letting Syria&#039;s Kobani fall to ISIS — (Image credit: The Daily Show)

U.S. officials, from President Obama down to the most junior House backbencher, have gravely warned that ISIS poses a serious, existential threat to the United States, Jon Stewart said on Wednesday night's Daily Show. But if ISIS is really "the most evil thing since Hitler's sliced bread," he asked, why is it that two weeks after America and its 40-member international coalition started bombing ISIS inside Syria, they haven't been able to stop the Islamist militants from overrunning Kobani, a Syrian Kurdish town on the Turkey border?

After making a yogurt joke (spoiler: Chobani), Stewart got serious. As one reporter said in a clip, Kobani matters "because a lot of people will get slaughtered, and that's an awful, awful thing," but it isn't a key city strategically — in other words, the ongoing U.S. airstrikes may help with the U.S. goal of saving civilians but won't do much to further the goal of destroying ISIS. "So Kobani seems to fall somewhere between a town about to fall to the greatest threat we've ever seen and uh, you know, a slow drip from a kitchen sink," Stewart said. Correspondent Jordan Klepper brought that point home with a sardonic report from "Kobani." --Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.