BAT YE’OR
NRO
Pres. Barack Obama was elected, by an overwhelming majority, on a program in which America’s rapprochement with Islam stands pre-eminent. This is a legitimate political aim in the quest for world peace. The questions are: how to achieve it, and why there is no reciprocal effort from the Muslim world represented by the Organization of the Islamic World (OIC). This body could express its regrets for over a millennium of jihad wars, land expropriations, enslavements, and humiliations of the conquered non-Muslim populations on three continents. Obama’s Cairo discourse fits perfectly into his agenda. It flatters Muslim sensibilities and expresses the Muslim view of historical tolerance and cultural superiority over infidel civilizations. When Obama mentioned the “Isra” event, he referred to Muhammad’s ascension to heaven and his return in one night on a winged mule named Buraq. There he greets two Muslim prophets, Moses and Jesus/Isa, who are not the biblical figures. The image used here by the American president as a symbolic interfaith reconciliation between the three faiths is a meeting between three Muslim prophets and not the figureheads of the three monotheistic religions. Besides, the Isra event is not recognised by non-Muslims, and it didn’t happen in Jerusalem, as this name does not appear once in the Koran.
The president’s speech is similar to many such declarations by European leaders. The question it raises is how much the West is ready to forgo truth and its basic principles in its supplication for obtaining peace with Islam. Clearly, the full Islamization of the West is the quickest way to obtain it. Obama’s political program in connection with the Alliance of Civilizations conforms to an OIC strategy that has already been accepted by the EU. In history, this policy has a name: the dhimmitude syndrome.
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
President Obama’s Cairo speech should have been called “a pretend beginning” rather than “a new beginning.” To the extent it wasn’t dangerously naïve, it provided little more than warmed-over left-wing dogma: Obama portrayed Islam and the world as he and other progressives would have them (the president said “progress” eleven times), rather than as they are — under the risible claim that his desired “partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t.”
In Obama’s bowdlerized Islam, the Koran teaches merely that “whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.” Quite apart from the fact that the president simply purged the very next inconvenient verse (which, as Robert Spencer points out, mandates the crucifixion or mutilation of those who fight against Allah and Muhammad), many in the Muslim world — not just terrorists — subscribe to a supremacist interpretation of scripture that does not regard non-Muslims as “innocents.”
The president implicitly denies the scriptural underpinnings of jihadist terror, which will not go away just because he declines to acknowledge them. And in many ways he denies the specter of terrorism itself: Palestinians practice not so much terror but “resistance through violence and killing”; Iran does not so much sponsor terrorism as “play a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians” — 30 years of jihadist savagery the president suggested were an understandable reaction to the covert American role 56 years ago in the coup against Iran’s leftist (but democratically elected) government. Meantime, Israelis and Americans are supposed to be understanding and accommodative, which will supposedly induce reason from those who seek their annihilation in Tehran and, as the president put it, in “Palestine.” And we should lay down our arms (especially our nukes) because it is somehow having them — rather than not having them — that destabilizes the international order.
It’s a fairy tale, but it would not have a happy ending.
— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).
MANSOOR IJAZ
The architecture of President Obama’s speech was brilliant — it certainly addressed the most burning issues facing Muslims around the world today.
Atmospherically, he hit it just right. His recitations from the Koran, his greeting to the gathering in Arabic, and even the respect he showed by saying “Muhammad, peace be upon him” when referring to Islam’s Holy Prophet, all demonstrated an abiding respect for Islamic traditions.
Thematically, the speech contained important ideas that, with the power of the U.S. presidency behind them, could just take root enough to matter. He offered to help Muslim communities around the world raise up and empower their women and educate their children in very concrete terms. He sought to equalize the playing field for minorities in Islamic countries whose persecution at the hands of extremists is one of the greater blights on its record as a great religion. And he planned to do all of this from an America that does not dictate any longer its brand of democracy but rather seeks to support governments that reflect the will of their people — governance born through the power of consent.
Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself — to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?
Islam’s worst enemies are within it. If wealthy Gulf Arabs want peace for Palestinians with Israel, why don’t they take a fraction of their profligate spending (in nightclubs in Geneva, at bars in London, at boutiques in Milan) and redirect it to rebuilding Palestinian enclaves with schools, hospitals, food-production facilities, and manufacturing plants? We might then have durable peace possible in the Middle East. Why didn’t Obama say that?
In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected a system of life that Islam’s holy scriptures urged Muslims to learn and practice, but over the centuries increasingly did not. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize the West and to try and bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate, or house.
— Mansoor Ijaz, a New York financier of Pakistani ancestry, jointly authored a ceasefire plan between Muslim militants and Indian security forces in Kashmir in 2000. He is an NRO contributor.
RAYMOND IBRAHIM
Though he early indicated that this would be an honest, heart-to-heart talk — “we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors” and “let me speak as clearly and plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together” — Obama did not follow through.
Obama followed every mild admonishment directed at the Islamic world immediately with several admissions of American mistakes, including reactions to 9/11, which “was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals.”
This double-standard is typified by the way he barely touched on the topic of Muslim persecution of religious minorities, while repeatedly gushing over how he’s helping American Muslims fulfill their zakat obligation and Muslim women wear the hijab vis-à-vis a non-friendly American system.
All fine platitudes, and (by now hackneyed) talk of “hope” and “change” — but will any of it be effective? Probably not, definitely not in the long term, where Obama — and the silly notion he embodies that all conflict is a product of “misunderstandings” and the need for “mutual respect” — is but a dot in that long continuum of stark history, one that he neither addressed nor understands.
— Raymond Ibrahim is editor of The Al Qaeda Reader.
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