Post-American Presidency (26 page)

Obama thought of himself as uniquely equipped to do this. He explained early in his presidential campaign that “I think the world would see me as a different kind of president, somebody who could see the world through their eyes.… If I convened a meeting with Muslim leaders around the world, to discuss how they can align themselves in our battle against terrorism, but also put our, the relationship between the West and the Islamic world on a more productive footing, I do so with the credibility of somebody who actually lived in a Muslim country for a number of years.”
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He remained consistent in this belief. The
Times
of London reported two days before the inauguration that Obama “believes a personal initiative will dramatise his wish to reassure Muslims, and intends to give a speech in an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office as a sign of his engagement.”
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Reassure Muslims? But who would seek to reassure non-Muslims alienated by jihad aggression and Islamic supremacism? Why, no one, of course. That would be “Islamophobic.” Rather than confront the doctrines of jihad and Islamic supremacism that fueled jihad activity worldwide, Obama seemed prepared from the very beginning of his presidency to submit to the rules demanded by the Islamic world.

Barack Obama was elected promising change, and a new direction in both domestic and foreign policies. His statements about meeting the challenge of the global jihad, however, were a de facto form of submission, an implementation of a soft Sharia: the quiet and piecemeal implementation of Islamic laws that subjugate non-Muslims. There was the capitulation on free speech at the UN, the respect of a brutal mullahcracy in Iran, and the demand to expel Jews from Israel and ethnically cleanse parts of Jerusalem of Jews. This was change—a fundamental change for America from being a singular force for
good and individual rights to capitulating to collectivism and subjugation.

The centerpiece of his “outreach” to the Islamic world was the Cairo speech of June 2009. In it, he was determined to show how much he “respected” the Islamic world—even to the point of twisting history and present-day reality.

CLICHÉS AND ANTI-AMERICANISM: THE CAIRO SPEECH

Obama’s much-anticipated Cairo speech to the Islamic world was widely hailed as a major breakthrough in U.S. relations with the Islamic world. But in reality, it was an exercise in pandering, appeasement, historical revisionism, leftist platitudes, and alarming naïveté.

Could any good policy come out of such a foundation?

Obama began with a bit of pandering: “I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning.” He said nothing about the fact that Al-Azhar’s Grand Sheikh, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, has given his approval—on Islamic grounds—to suicide bombing.
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It was no surprise, then, when he characterized jihad violence as emanating from “a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The idea that the jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, but has no evidence to back it up. The evidence that seems to establish it is highly tendentious—Obama adviser Dalia Mogahed, working on survey data for the Gallup organization with Saudi-funded academic John Esposito, cooked survey data from the Islamic world to increase the number of “moderates.”
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Bat Ye’or, the world’s leading scholar of dhimmitude, the institutionalized
mistreatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, said this of Obama’s speech in Cairo:

Obama demonstrated a continual unwillingness to acknowledge plain facts, asserting that “the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.” He predictably ignored the fact that the Islamic texts and teachings that inspired those attacks have fueled this perception. Of course, Obama was not singular in declining to acknowledge the existence of such texts and teachings. In that he was following virtually every influential American politician, diplomat, and analyst.

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.”
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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.”
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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 ([email protected]).”

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.’”
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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 Muslim Outreach, with a Muslim woman of Indian descent, Farah Pandith, serving as the new U.S. special representative for Muslim outreach.