Post-American Presidency (28 page)
Read Post-American Presidency Online
Authors: Robert Spencer,Pamela Geller
Changing Course
also recommended efforts to “deepen mutual understanding and challenge stereotypes.”
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Obama duly said in his June 2009 Cairo speech that he considered it part of his “responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
The U.S.–Muslim Engagement document called upon the incoming president to reaffirm “the U.S. commitment to prohibit all forms
of torture,” which Obama did in connection with the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. It recommended that “within the first three months of the Administration,” the new president should “initiate a major and sustained diplomatic effort to resolve regional conflicts and promote security cooperation in the Middle East, giving top priority to engagement with Iran and permanent resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
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And Obama has duly reached his outstretched hand to Iran, and put pressure on the Israelis to make further concessions to the Palestinians.
The correspondence between all this and Obama’s policies were exact, and there was more.
Changing Course
“supports engagement with groups that have clearly demonstrated a commitment to nonviolent participation in politics.”
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So also
The Doha Compact
: “the United States should be more willing to reach out to Islamist parties that genuinely demonstrate their readiness to embrace the democratic rules of the game and reject violence.”
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This referred primarily to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is attached to Sharia but willing to work for it through the ballot box and cultural initiatives. Obama made sure that Brotherhood members were in the audience when he gave his Cairo speech in June 2009.
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The call to support nonviolent pro-Sharia parties may also have fueled Obama’s fantasies of the “moderate Taliban.”
Changing Course
warns against supplying “ammunition to extremists by linking the term ‘Islam’ or key tenets of the religion of Islam with the actions of extremist or terrorist groups.”
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The Doha Compact
agrees: “Ill-considered terms like ‘Islamofascism,’ ‘Islamic terrorism,’ and ‘Islamic jihadist’ tend to alienate potential friends, while implicitly endorsing the worldview of extremists like bin Laden by suggesting they are true Muslims.”
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The fact that it is Islamic jihadists, not antiterror analysts, who have energetically equated the texts and teachings of Islam with violence and terrorism was, as usual, glossed over—and Obama was happy to
abet this disconnect from reality. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech he spoke of “the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan.” Engaging in another historical flight of fancy, Obama added: “These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.”
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That Islamic jihad aggression preceded the Crusades by 450 years seems to have escaped him.
The Doha Compact
directed that the president who took office in January 2009 should “close down the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, which has unfortunately become a symbol of American excesses and extralegal maneuvers in the war on terror” and “should ban the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects.”
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Obama set out to do those things from the beginning of his presidency. “The next American president,”
The Doha Compact
also declared, “should travel to the region early in his or her term, meeting not only with leaders, but also visiting mosques.”
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Obama did that, too.
He didn’t seem concerned with the Muslim Brotherhood ties of both initiatives, or with how their dictates weakened the United States. He didn’t even seem concerned about the fact that the more he accommodated the Islamic world, the angrier and more demanding Islamic states seemed to become.
No wonder jihad terror activity spiked within the United States itself.
AN ISLAMO-CHRISTIAN NATION
IN BARACK OBAMA’S INAUGURAL
ADDRESS HE SAID: “WE ARE A NATION OF CHRISTIANS
AND MUSLIMS, JEWS AND HINDUS, AND NONBElievers
.”
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The displacement of the Jews from the second position after Christians in Obama’s listing had to be intentional. Then, just six days later, Obama restored the Jews to the second position, but after the Muslims: when the post-American president gave his first televised interview as president to Dubai’s Al-Arabiya News Channel, he made a point of calling America “a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers.”
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In that order.
The casual abandonment of the longtime workaday phrase “a
Judeo-Christian nation” was portentous. In one broad stroke Obama sought to diminish, if not completely obliterate, the enormous part the Jews played in the American success story. Obama has never spoken about the inestimable contribution the Jews made to the birth of America or to its subsequent unparalleled historical achievements. Obama never spoke of, say, Haym Solomon, the Jewish patriot and member of the Sons of Liberty who was captured and tortured by the British in the early days of the American Revolution. Solomon loaned as much as $800,000 to the revolutionary cause; in today’s dollars, that’s about $40 billion. Solomon himself died in poverty after giving everything he had for the cause of American freedom.
Why the reclassification of Jews and Christians? And why would Obama make this his first order of business as soon as he took office? That it was his top priority was made painfully clear when he gave his first interview as president to the Arab world on Al-Arabiya. It would become increasingly clear in the ensuing weeks and months that Barack Hussein Obama was attempting to shift the American paradigm. What was once a given was to be taken. The Judeo-Christian tradition, the essential DNA of American principles, thought, and governance was to be replaced with a false narrative and a dangerous idea—an “Islamo-Christian” ethic.
Were Christians who might be indifferent to such an idea aware of the status of Christians in Islamic countries? Were Christians aware that there was no pluralism in Islamic nations? Traditional Islamic law called for Jews and Christians in Islamic lands to live in a state of chastened subservience to Muslims, denied basic rights in an attempt to ensure that they always remembered their renegade status as those who had rejected the truth of Islam. The hallmark of this mistreatment was a special tax,
jizya
, mandated in the Qur’an (9:29). The Muslims could revoke this contract of “protection” (
dhimma
) at any time if the protected people (dhimmis) got out of line. While the institutionalized
discrimination and harassment of this state of dhimmitude is not fully enforced in most Muslim countries today, it remains a part of Islamic law—and a cultural hangover that results in numerous forms of discrimination for non-Muslims in Islamic countries today.
AMERICA’S ISLAMIC HISTORY
These were facts of Islamic history. Obama, bent on fashioning some new accord with the Islamic world, ignored them—but he did not ignore history altogether. In the infancy of his presidency, he seemed to be intent upon rewriting American history. Just as he retailed historical myths about Muslim Spain in his June 2009 speech in Cairo, here he created, out of whole cloth, an Islamic history in America:
I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started businesses, taught at our Universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers—Thomas Jefferson—kept in his personal library.
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It was exaggerated to the point of fiction, or distorted almost beyond recognition—for one thing, Jefferson most likely had a Qur’an not because he respected or revered Islam, but because he wanted to
understand the belief system of the Barbary Pirates who were bedeviling American ships in those days, and to whom the United States had been paying tribute—a practice Jefferson ended. But Obama had made it clear, repeatedly: this fictionalized history would henceforth take precedence over the real thing.
In his overwhelming desire to submit to and appease the Islamic world, Obama more than once trafficked in such fulsome historical fictions that may have bolstered the egos of his audience as well as his own, but they did nothing to blunt the force of the global Islamic jihad. If anything, they did just the opposite. Obama emboldened and empowered the
ummah
(the worldwide Islamic community). They were winning, just as their prophet predicted, with this strategy for installing a global caliphate.
“We will convey,” said Barack Obama to the Turkish Parliament in April 2009, “our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world—including in my own country.”
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Undeniably the Islamic faith has done a great deal to shape the world—a statement that makes no value judgment about exactly
how
it has shaped the world. It has formed the dominant culture in what is known as the Islamic world for centuries. But what on earth could Obama mean when he says that Islam has also “done so much” to shape his own country?
ISLAM SHAPED AMERICA?
Unless he considered himself an Indonesian, Obama’s statement was extraordinarily strange. After all, how has the Islamic faith shaped the United States? Were there Muslims along Paul Revere’s ride, or standing next to Patrick Henry when he proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death”?
Were there Muslims among the framers or signers of the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men—not just Muslims, as Islamic law would have it—are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Were there Muslims among those who drafted the Constitution and vigorously debated its provisions, or among those who enumerated the Bill of Rights, which guarantees—again in contradiction to the tenets of Islamic law—that there should be no established national religion, and that the freedom of speech should not be infringed?
There were not.
Did Muslims play a role in the great struggle over slavery that defined so much of our contemporary understandings of the nature of this republic and of the rights of the individual within it? They did not. In fact, Muhammad owned slaves, and the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted—making abolition movements virtually impossible in an Islamic context. Muslim countries have abolished slavery under pressure from the non-Muslim West, not because of any impulse arising from Islam itself.
Bat Ye’or, the paramount historian of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, saw larger issues at play in this: “Freedom of discussion and criticism (forbidden in Islamic countries) brought reforms (non-existent in Islam). The concepts of human rights, freedom and democracy, and the abolition of slavery come from the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
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Did the Islamic faith shape the way the United States responded to the titanic challenges of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, or the Cold War? It did not. Did the Islamic faith, with its legal apparatus that institutionalizes discrimination against non-Muslims, shape the civil rights movement in the United States?
Did the mainstream media, on which the American people rely to vet our candidates, question Barack Hussein Obama on this? Did they
even superficially ask the most cursory of questions? Or ask Obama to provide empirical evidence? No. Chris Matthews’s leg couldn’t handle the electroshock to answer such questions.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated equality of access to public facilities—a hard-won victory that came at a great cost, and one that Muslim groups have tried to roll back in the United States recently. One notable example of such attempts was the alcohol-in-cabs controversy at the Minneapolis–St. Paul international airport, when Muslim cabdrivers began to refuse service to customers who were carrying alcohol, on Islamic religious grounds. The core assumption underlying this initiative—that discrimination on the basis of religion is justified—cut right to the heart of the core principle of the American polity, that “all men are created equal,” that is, that they have a right to equal treatment in law and society. Alcohol might seem to be a trivial matter; the threatening of the principle of equal access to services is not.
Surveying the whole tapestry of American history, one would be hard-pressed to find any significant way in which the Islamic faith has shaped the United States in terms of its governing principles and the nature of American society. Meanwhile, there are numerous ways in which, if there had been a Muslim presence in the country at the time, some of the most cherished and important principles of American society and law may have met fierce resistance, and may never have seen the light of day.
So in what way has the Islamic faith shaped Obama’s country? The most significant event connected to the Islamic faith that has shaped the character of the United States was the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Those attacks have shaped the nation in numerous ways: they’ve led to numerous innovations in airline security, which in generations to come—if today’s politically
correct climate continues to befog minds—may be added to future versions of the “1001 Muslim Inventions” exhibition.
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