When Obama speaks, Mubarack says, "Huh?"
In his celebrated speech in Cairo, Egypt in June of 2009, the President called for peace in the Middle East. In an effort to appeal to the best traditions of the three monotheistic religions that came from the region, he read quotations from their holy books:
The Holy Koran tells us, “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.”
The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”
The Holy Bible tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth.
Few commented on these quotations at the time, but anyone reading them today must be struck by what distinguishes the Koran from the others: the lack of the word “peace.” “Know one another” is certainly not the same thing as “promoting peace,” and dividing the world into tribes and nations and men and women is very different from calling for an end to conflict. Yet Obama presented the three quotations as if he thought that they were somehow equivalent.
Indeed, it is very hard to cite the Koran, even selectively, for evidence that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, yearns for peace. In the run-up to the Yitzhak Rabin-Yasser Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, President Clinton’s speechwriters called on the great American scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, for a quotation from the Koran that the president could use for the occasion. Lewis cited one from memory. “Not that one,” he was told. “We’ve already used that one. We need another one.” Lewis was forced to reply, “I don’t think there is another one.”
Obama’s Cairo speech was also full of misstatements about the history of the Muslim world, all designed to demonstrate that Islam made many important contributions to Western civilization. There are such contributions, but many of the examples the president used were, at best, misleading, above all his contention that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance.” In fact, there is not a single instance in the long history of Islam in which Jews have been “tolerated” (at least as we use the word today) by a Muslim ruler or government. In every case, the Jews have been stigmatized as formally inferior, forced to identify themselves as such (sometimes having to wear certain clothing or symbols), and compelled to pay onerous financial tribute to their rulers. No wonder that, in the mid-20th century, the Jews of the Middle East fled their ancient homelands for freedom in what would become Israel, a journey toward freedom made all the more dramatic by the fact that Muslim Arabs now live, work and even serve in Parliament in this Israel, alongside Christians and Jews.
Obama’s refusal to recognize the historical or religious differences between Islamic and Judeo-Christian attitudes toward peace suggests that, despite his years in Muslim Indonesia, he knows very little about Islam. The Koran is chock-full of calls to dominate and slaughter infidels, with particular emphasis on the Jews. Its intimations of genocide have been codified into an action plan by our major enemy (and Israel’s) in the Middle East today – Iran. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who created the Islamic Republic of Iran in the late 1970s, left a time capsule 30 years ago that President Obama has unfortunately not yet opened:
Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those are witless. Islam says ‘Kill the unbelievers.... Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter their armies!’... There are thousands of other [Koranic] verses and hadiths urging Muslims to value war.... Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.
The Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaims himself the spiritual guide for all Muslims. This is not mere cant. As we have learned at great cost in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iranians have funded, armed, protected and guided Islamist terrorists of different cults and nationalities and directed their murderous fervor toward us and our allies for more than three decades. The Iranian regime routinely organizes large crowds to chant “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” Its agents and military officers carry out those threats throughout the Middle East and even in cities as remote from this region as Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the Israeli Embassy and later a Jewish social center were bombed by Iranian-sponsored terrorists. All in the name of a version of Islam that boasts tens of millions of followers and openly states that evocations of peace are a sham.
Nonviolence
President Obama’s ignorance of Muslim history and theology is not only unbecoming for a world leader but also very dangerous for a man facing a global explosion of radical Islamic violence, much of it aimed against the United States itself. His ignorance of such fundamental matters goes hand-in-hand with a collection of politically soothing beliefs about human and political nature that is also based upon historical distortions. The most important of these is the happy thought that serious problems cannot be resolved by violence and that America’s own history “proves” that. In Cairo, Obama put it this way:
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.
Except that it certainly wasn’t. The bloodiest war of the 19th-century world – the American Civil War – was the most important event in the elimination of slavery in this country, without which Dr. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent campaign against segregation would have been unimaginable. For that matter, “America’s founding” was itself the result of violent war, and George Washington, the victorious commanding general in that conflict, became our first president.
President Obama is predictably a great admirer of committed anti-Israel activists such as Mary Robinson and Obama’s like-minded friend, Prof. Rashid Khalidi, whose view of America’s proper role in the Middle East was summarized by Martin Kramer:
[T]here is no cause that could ever justify an American use of force in the Middle East. ... It is America’s use of strong armed force – and the parallel violence of Israel – which have provoked the counter-violence of the extremists. If America were to give up its bullying ways, and address the “grievances” of Arabs and Muslims, the latter would regain their respect for America. There are no pathologies in the Middle East that haven’t been caused by imperialism, and no pathologies that can’t be cured by displays of American humility and penitence.
There is very little, if anything, in those words with which President Obama is known to differ. If anything, his repeated apologies for presumed American sins in the past, including the use of armed force, suggest that he fully believes them. His calls for “engagement” and his rote insistence that the fractious conflicts of the Middle East can be resolved by addressing grievances at the negotiating table go hand-in-hand with those beliefs.
Excerpted from Michael Ledeen's Obama’s Betrayal of Israel.
Published by Encounter Broadsides
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