And: “Islam has always been part of America.” Really?
February 4, 2016
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
When Barack Obama visited the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, he said: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Muslim Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.”
While Obama has been President, Muslims have murdered non-Muslims, avowedly in the cause of Islam, at Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino, and attempted to do so in many, many other places. Imagine if armed Baptists screaming “Jesus is Lord” had committed murder, and explained that they were doing so in order to advance Christianity, in four American cities, and had attempted to do so in many others. Imagine that those killers were supporters of a global Christian movement that had repeatedly called for attacks on U.S. civilians and declared its determination to destroy the United States.
Imagine how incongruous it would be in that case for the President of the United States to visit a church and say: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Christian Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.” And imagine how unlikely it would be that Barack Obama would ever have done that.
But his visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore was the apotheosis of the Muslim victimhood myth, as he signaled yet again to the world (and worldwide jihadis) that in the U.S., Muslims are victims, victims of unwarranted concern over jihad terror, and thus that concern is likely to lessen even more, as Obama dismantles still more of our counter-terror apparatus.
“We’ve seen children bullied, we’ve seen mosques vandalized,” Obama claimed. “It’s not who we are. We’re one American family. And when any part of our family begins to feel separate or second class, it tears at the heart of our nation” – he said to his gender-segregated Muslim audience, with the women sitting in the back. In reality, Muslims are not victimized in American society: FBI hate crime statistics show that the hysteria over “Islamophobia” is unfounded, but that matters not at all to Barack Obama. At the mosque, he said: “If we’re serious about freedom of religion — and I’m talking to my fellow Christians who are the majority in this country — we have to understand that an attack on one faith is an attack on all faiths.”
Once again Obama felt free to scold and admonish Christians, but said nothing about Muslims in the U.S. needing to clean house and work for real reform that would mitigate jihad terror. And his premise was false: there is no attempt to restrict Muslims’ freedom of religion. Donald Trump hasn’t called for that; nor has Ben Carson or any serious analyst. But the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) (a representative of which accompanied Obama to the mosque Wednesday) and other Islamic advocacy groups have consistently charged that counter-terror efforts and attempts to restrict the political, supremacist and authoritarian aspects of Sharia that are at variance with Constitutional principles were tantamount to restricting Muslims’ religious freedom.
Now the President of the United States has endorsed their false narrative, which will only further stigmatize initiatives to understand the jihadis’ ideology and counter it effectively. He further criticized those who dare to suggest that Islam might have something to do with Islamic terrorism by criticizing those who say that the U.S. is at war with Islam: “That kind of mind-set helps our enemies,” he intoned. “It helps our enemies recruit. It makes us all less safe.”
The U.S. certainly isn’t at war with Islam, but segments of the Islamic world are at war with the U.S., and Obama did not explain what might be done to counter the beliefs that have given rise to that idea. He is, of course, against studying the beliefs of the enemy. Yet he said proudly: “Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Qur’an,” without bothering to mention that they had them in order to understand the ideology of the enemy the new nation faced in the Barbary Pirates. They held, of course, the same ideology he ignores and denies today, the one he ordered all traces of removed from counterterror training.
“Islam,” Obama declared, “has always been part of America.” Really? There were Muslims at Jamestown? In the Massachusetts Bay Colony? At Roanoke? Obama’s statement is so wildly ridiculous that it doesn’t just invite parody; it pleads for it. Remember the Muslims among the Founding Fathers, Yahya al-Adams and Iskandar Hamilton? Remember the Muslims who told James Madison about Muhammad’s Constitution of Medina so that he could lay out the foundations of a republic in the U.S. Constitution? Remember the Muslims who fought so valiantly in the Revolutionary Jihad, and the Jihad of 1812, and the Mexican Jihad, and the Civil War, aka the Jihad Between the Caliphates? Remember all the controversies about whether Muslim soldiers in the Civil War could make sex slaves out of the wives and daughters of Confederate commanders? The jihad suicide attacks that broke the Germans’ will to fight on during World War I?
Burrowing deeper into fantasy, Obama proclaimed: “Generations of Muslim Americans helped to build our nation.” He didn’t mention the real contributions Muslims have made to our nation: you know, like rearranging the New York skyline, transforming government buildings into grim, nervous fortresses, making air travel into exercise in annoyance and humiliation that it is today, and draining the American economy with two futile wars and hundreds of billions spent on security and counterterror initiatives.
In detailing the contributions that Muslims have made to the U.S., Obama said: “Muslim Americans keep up safe. They are our police. They are our fire fighters. They’re in (the Department of) Homeland Security.” And remember: none of them were screened for jihadi sympathies. To have done so would have been “Islamophobic,” and transgressed against the prevailing dogma that Islam is a Religion of Peace that non-Muslims are wrong and bigoted to be concerned about.
The most ominous thing Obama said in this speech full of treacle and humbug was this: “We’re not going to strengthen our leadership around the world by allowing politicians to insult Muslims or pit groups of Americans against each other. That’s not who we are. That’s not keeping America safe.” So what is he going to do? Destroy the First Amendment and disallow politicians to insult Muslims?
Obama decried “phony tough talk and bluster and over-the-top claims.” Yet in the final analysis, that was all he offered.
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