Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Fitzgerald: How the Islamic world views Obama

Menashe Amir, the Iranian-born head of Radio Israel’s Persian language service, has said: “One of the Iranian religious leaders said if Obama will enter the White House, then Islam will conquer the heart of the American nation.” Of course Barack Obama is not a Muslim. But if Muslim peoples and states are heartened by the belief that his "Muslim connection" makes him a secret sympathizer, and if he acts in such a way as to allow Muslims, with their conspiracy-theory view of things (conspiracies against them, but also secret conspiracies by "hidden" Muslims), to continue to believe that he is, then it is not enough for him merely to deny being a Muslim. For that is not the main point, or should not be, in what is worrisome about that "Muslim connection" insufficiently rejected. Obama has not provided any demonstration of that rejection -- a meeting with Ayaan Hirsi Ali might help. Nor has he shown any understanding of Islam that takes us beyond the sentimental pieties of Bush, Rice, and others in the current, miscomprehending and therefore confused and endlessly surprised administration. See, for example, the dawning realization that Pakistan is not that "staunch" ally that Bush kept thinking it surely must be, and never was -- and because of Islam, never can be.

And if Muslim regimes and rulers and peoples believe that Obama is a "secret sympathizer" (naturally not making a move toward an open return, or reversion, to Islam out of political calculations that they, the taqiyya-masters, find perfectly understandable, even laudable), they may well be emboldened to act as they might otherwise not act. See Iran, see its possible imperviousness to pressure from an American government headed, as many may think, by a "secret Muslim sympathizer." See Slow Jihadists and Fast Jihadists alike.

For that matter, think of European political figures. How easy will it be for them to meet with an American President named Barack Obama and confide in him, behind closed doors, that the situation in their lands has become very dangerous, and will become more so, because of the enlarged presence of aggressive Muslims? How easy will it be for them to explain that the Western countries, working in tandem, must not only end Muslim immigration, but also end Saudi and other outside funding of mosques, madrasas, propaganda, campaigns of Da'wa, and finally, create an atmosphere that is not one of continued accommodation but of resolute refusal to make their countries any more Islam-friendly than they already have made them -- to their own great sorrow, based on a dawning realization of what has passed, and is passing, and is to come?

Will the leaders of France, Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands confide in Barack Obama? In the councils of NATO, will generals from European countries describe to their American counterparts the terrible internal security risks that Muslims in European armies, and police forces, and simply inside the Lands of the Infidels, the Bilad al-Kufr, now so obviously pose? Or will they hesitate, because they too, are uncertain about Barack Obama?

These are not theoretical nor wild questions. They are verisimilar. They are perfectly valid. And the fact that at neither Barack Obama nor his advisers have recognized this problem, or have warned Muslim rulers and regimes and peoples not to harbor any illusions about supposed "secret sympathies" -- well, that both amazes and alarms.

Compounding this alarm is Obama’s choice of foreign policy advisers. Obama chose, early on, the egregious and execrable Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s man. Does Obama really wish to be associated with Jimmy Carter in any way? Brzezinski helped Carter abandon the Shah (with Gary Sick playing his little role as an “Iran expert”), though I doubt that Brzezinski had a hand in composing Carter’s treacly letter to the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was addressed by Carter “as a fellow man of faith.” And Brzezinski, with Carter, was the chief bullier of Begin and the rest of the Israeli delegation at Camp David.

And then there is Samantha Power. Her entire career has been owed to her “work” on genocide; the Sudan made her. Yet there is no indication that Samantha Power understands that the Sudan has been an exhibit over the past two decades of Muslim Arab malevolence and aggression toward the Christians and animists of the south and toward the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur. In the south it has been a classic Jihad, designed to continue the push southward by the forces of Islam that has been going on, slowly at first, over the past century in the Sudan. The result has been about 2 million murdered or starved to death. And in Darfur, which for some reason was of much greater interest to the kristofs and the powers that be, exhibits the signs of being not a classic Jihad against the Infidel, but is rather a manifestation of the Arab supremacism of which Islam has always been the vehicle.

While McCain shows similar incomprehension, all this hardly inspires confidence in Barack Obama.

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