Post-American Presidency
Page 20
But here again, the policies Obama has pursued since he became president give an ominous cast to his tendency to exonerate the Islamic world and blame America for the conflict between the two. While speaking a great deal about human rights and even vowing to fight for the right of Islamic women in the West to wear the Islamic headscarf, he said nothing throughout his speech about the Sharia laws that impugn the dignity of women and non-Muslims by denying them various basic rights. “The U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it,” Obama said proudly. “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”
To this the columnist Mark Steyn responded acidly: “My oh my, he’s a profile in courage, isn’t he? It’s true that there have been occasional frictions over, say, the refusal of Muslim women to reveal their faces for their driver’s licenses—Sultaana Freeman, for example, sued the state of Florida over that ‘right.’ But the real issue in the Western world is ‘the right of women and girls’ not ‘to wear the hijab.’ A couple of weeks ago in Arizona, a young woman called Noor Almaleki was fatally run over by her father in his Jeep Cherokee for becoming ‘too Westernized.’ If there were a Matthew Shepard–style gay crucifixion every few months, liberal columnists would be going bananas about the ‘climate of hate’ in America. But you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse (to cite merely the most lurid recent examples of North American ‘honour killings’), and nobody cares. Certainly, there’s no danger of Barack Obama ever standing up for the likes of poor Miss Almaleki to a roomful of A-list imams.”16
Indeed not.
Obama even went so far as to say: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
Assuming that such stereotypes actually exist, and that negativity toward Islam among non-Muslims isn’t entirely a reaction to jihad violence and Islamic supremacism, why was this his responsibility? Was it his responsibility as president to fight against negative stereotypes of Christians as ignorant racist yahoos? Was it his responsibility as president to fight against negative stereotypes of Hindus? Jews? Black Americans? American Southerners? Californians? Or was it only his responsibility to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam? If the latter, why? On what basis? By what justification?
In any case, Obama indulged in a bit of negative stereotyping of his own—against Israel. “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”
His comparison of the Palestinians with black Americans was unconscionable. Were the Israelis Bull Connor and George Wallace? For the comparison to hold, black Americans must have been launching daily rocket attacks against white civilians, and blowing themselves up at those segregated lunch counters during crowded lunch hours.
Obama took another flight of fancy when he said: “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” (Obama clumsily pronounced the latter “Cordóba” rather than “Córdoba,” demonstrating a closer acquaintance with Ricardo Montalban’s Chrysler commercials from the 1980s than with the actual history and geography of Spain.)
This is sheer historical myth. Even Maria Rosa Menocal, in her hagiographical treatment of Muslim Spain, The Ornament of the World, admits that non-Muslims did not enjoy equality of rights with Muslims in Andalusia and Cordoba: “The dhimmi, as these covenanted peoples were called, were granted religious freedom, not forced to convert to Islam. They could continue to be Jews and Christians, and, as it turned out, they could share in much of Muslim social and economic life. In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax—no Muslims paid taxes—and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.”17
So much for that “proud tradition of tolerance.” But on this farrago of historical myth, anti-Americanism, and shameless pandering, Barack Obama set out to build a foreign policy. He abandoned Israel, appeased Iran, and took steps to enable the spread of Islamic supremacism around the world.
STATE DEPARTMENT’S RAMADAN OUTREACH
In August 2009, a State Department cable went out with this announcement: “The Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) has assembled a range of innovative and traditional tools to support Posts’ outreach activities during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.”
State Department outreach during the Islamic holy month? The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and official government activities on behalf of a particular religion have been found to be in violation of that clause in recent years. However, when it comes to Islam all that seemed to go out the window.
The State Department’s Ramadan programs were wide-ranging. “On August 10,” the cable continues, “America.gov will publish a ‘Multicultural Ramadan’ feature. American Muslims trace their ancestry to more than 80 countries and the feature will highlight the richness of these various cultural traditions through the lens of Ramadan and Eid. Content will include essays by young Muslims who are part of Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core (IYC). Contact: Alexandra Abboud (AbboudAM@state.gov).”
Still more was planned. The Bureau of International Information Programs was set to “publish three articles for Ramadan 2009 addressing the concept of an Islam in America ‘brand’; advocacy (civic and political) of the Muslim American community; and community innovation/community building. The writer will contact Muslim American experts in each of these fields. These articles will be available on America.gov in English, Arabic, and Persian.”
The main publication was entitled Being Muslim in America: “Conceived as IIP’s flagship print publication on the rich and varied experiences of the nation’s growing Muslim population, this lavishly illustrated new book links the Muslim-American experience to those of other American racial, religious, and immigrant groups as they moved into the American ‘mainstream.’”18
Such was the State Department during the post-American presidency.
Can you imagine every American embassy and consulate putting up a menorah and having some rabbis as speakers via a Webcast?
Can you imagine if we had the Stations of the Cross put on the walls of all our embassies, consulates, and other posts, as well as the many Department of State buildings across the country, including C Street?
Why aren’t priests and pastors invited during Christmas to give blessings or talk about Christianity in the United States?
Can you imagine if some Buddhist monks came to do a meditation session with the officers of each embassy and consulate?
Can we get printed and distributed Hare Krishna posters for all our posts, so as to reach massive audiences?
In Barack Obama’s State Department, of course, only Islam merited such marginally constitutional privileges.
Perhaps the State Department Ramadan outreach was the brainchild of Obama’s office for outreach to the ummah at State—an office that had existed for less than two months when notice went out of the State Department Ramadan initiatives. In June 2009, Obama had the secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, at the White House. Ihsanoglu urged Obama to appoint a U.S. ambassador to the Islamic world—and Obama immediately created a new State Department Office for Mus
lim Outreach, with a Muslim woman of Indian descent, Farah Pandith, serving as the new U.S. special representative for Muslim outreach.
In keeping with Obama’s U.S.–Muslim Engagement Project, a charter of dhimmitude, we were to be conditioned to respect Muslim immigrants and accept their culture—and any suspicion regarding terrorist activities among them was to be rejected for fear of being charged with “Islamophobia.”
Obama appeared to be more than comfortable with this deal with the devil as he abetted the replacement of America’s Judeo-Christian ethic with an Islamo-Christian ethic—which would ultimately destroy the very foundation of this country. Muslims persecute Christians in every country they finally dominate—never in world history have Muslims coexisted as equals with Christians in any Islamic land. The Christians are always subjugated as inferiors, in accord with directives of Islamic law that are still in place.
But none of that appears to be at all important to Barack Hussein Obama.
Why was this immense effort necessary? Columnist Burt Prelutsky said it best: “The Islamists have been actively at war with us for 30 years and generally at war with western civilization for well over a thousand years, and still we pay lip service to these people in a way we never did with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union. Is it because the Muslims commit sadism and murder in the name of religion and not country? If anything, I would think that would make their evil acts all the more contemptible.”19
HAJ GREETINGS FROM BARACK HUSSEIN
The Islamophilic president went so far as to issue a heartfelt special greeting and best wishes to the Muslim pilgrims in Mecca for the Haj… on Thanksgiving Day 2009. Obama asserted that “the rituals of Haj and Eid al-Adha both serve as reminders of the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world’s major religions.” And he noted: “Muslims around the world will celebrate Eid-al-Adha and distribute food to the less fortunate to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son out of obedience to God.”
In this Obama yet again exacerbated tensions instead of calming them. The Islamic Feast of Eid al-Adha commemorates the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca, the haj, and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son—Ishmael in the Muslim version. In thinking of Abraham, most Americans think of the biblical figure. In Genesis 22:15–18, Abraham is rewarded for his faith and told he will become a blessing to the nations: “By your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.”
But the Muslim audiences that Obama addressed in this message did not read Genesis. They read the Qur’an, in which Allah says that Abraham was an “excellent example” for the believers only when he told his pagan family that “there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred for ever, unless ye believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). The same verse says that Abraham is not an excellent example, however, when he tells his pagan father, “I will pray for forgiveness for you.”20
Thus the Qur’an, in its picture of Abraham—the man Obama invoked as the quintessential symbol of the common elements of the three faiths—held up hatred as exemplary, while belittling the virtue of forgiveness. Obama thereby reinforced a worldview that took for granted the legitimacy of everlasting enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims—and did so while attempting to build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims.
He also retained, as his chief liaison to the Islamic world, a defender of Sharia: the draconian Islamic law that mandates stoning of adulterers, amputation of thieves’ hands, and legal discrimination against women and non-Muslims.
DEFENDING SHARIA
Dalia Mogahed, Barack Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, appeared on British television in October 2009, where she said: “Sharia is not well understood and Islam as a faith is not well understood.” How have we misunderstood Islamic law? We have associated it with “maximum criminal punishments” and “laws that… to many people seem unequal to women.” The Western view of Sharia was “oversimplified,” said Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs; most Muslim women worldwide, she said, associate it with “gender justice.”
Here’s some gender justice straight out of the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book that forms the basis of Sharia. The Qur’an declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282). It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter (4:11). The Qur’an tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives (4:34). It also allows for marriage to prepubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4).
All these stipulations—about testimony, inheritance, wife beating, marriage, and divorce—remain part of Sharia to this day. So does the law that a wife must not refuse sex to her husband, no matter where or when he makes the demand. This is based on a saying of the Islamic prophet Muhammad: “If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e., to have sexual relations] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” And another: “By him in Whose Hand lies my life, a woman can not carry out the right of her Lord, till she carries out the right of her husband. And if he asks her to surrender herself [to him for sexual intercourse] she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle.”
Gender justice. And that’s not all. Mogahed, a member of the president’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, made her defense of Sharia on a TV show hosted by a member of Hizb ut Tahrir. This is an international organization that is banned as a terrorist group in many nations, and which is openly dedicated to the worldwide imposition of Sharia and the destruction of all governments that are constituted according to any other political philosophy—including constitutional republics that do not establish a state religion.
On the show with Mogahed were two Hizb ut Tahrir representatives, who repeatedly attacked “man-made law” and the “lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism” one encounters in Western societies. They said Sharia should be “the source of legislation.” Not “a” source. “The” source.
Obama’s adviser Mogahed, for her part, offered no contradiction to any of this. Should an adviser to the president of the United States really have given her sanction to such a group? Apparently she has no problem with its goal, since instead of defending the American system of government, she maintained that Sharia was popular among Muslim women: “I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of Sharia than the common perception in Western media.”
On the same show, Dalia Mogahed described her job in the Obama administration as involving efforts “to convey… to the president and other public officials what it is Muslims want.” What Muslims want. Not what America might want from Muslims—i.e., a recognition of the ways in which Sharia contradicts the Constitution regarding the equality of all people before the law, and a forthright rejection of those elements of Sharia. No one, Muslim or non-Muslim, seems concerned about any challenge to those provisions from the adherents of Sharia.
Perhaps they should have listened more closely to Dalia Mogahed.
MUTUAL RESPECT?
Obama spoke often about establishing “mutual respect” with the Islamic world. But that respect seemed to be a one-way street. In denigrating his own country and retailing historical myths about the Islamic world, he was only augmenting the haughtiness that was a centerpiece of Islamic supremacism. In endeavoring at least ostensibly to take away the impetus for Islamic terrorism around the world, he was fueling some of its core assumptions: that America was an evil polity, responsible for the conflicts and tensions roiling the world; that Islam was a great civilization, destined to shine again as it once had in the misty distant past—a beacon of light to the world.
Barack Obama, son and stepson of two Muslims, raised a Muslim himself, seemed determined to be the engine of that resurgence.
What was peculiar in all this was that many who were raised Muslim but left Islam—scholars such as Ibn Warraq, politicians such as Ayaa
n Hirsi, doctors such as Wafa Sultan—were quite vocal about the violations of human rights, the misogyny, the oppression, the child marriages, that they witnessed in Muslim societies. Obama must have seen such things while growing up in the largest Muslim country in the world and attending Qur’anic classes and Islamic study. But they fight against these human-rights abuses, while he embraces the Islamic world uncritically. He respects it, human-rights abuses and all.
THE U.S.–MUSLIM ENGAGEMENT PROJECT: CHARTER FOR DHIMMITUDE
Why was Obama acting this way? The answer lay in his unshakable commitment to the U.S.–Muslim Engagement Project, a multifaceted initiative designed, in its own words, to “create a coherent, broad-based and bipartisan strategy and set of recommendations to improve relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world; and communicate and advocate this strategy in ways that shift U.S. public opinion and contribute to changes in U.S. policies, and public and private action.”21
This strategy and series of recommendations was laid out in two principal documents. One was the George Soros–funded Report of the Leadership Group on U.S.–Muslim Engagement: Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World, from September 2008. The other was closely related to the U.S.–Muslim Engagement initiative: The Doha Compact: New Directions: America and the Muslim World, from the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. The Doha Compact appeared in October 2008.