That’s for sure — oh, wait, that’s not what he meant.
From the Pakistan Daily Times:
LAHORE: 9/11 has brought Americans closer to Islam, since the Americans started studying Islam after the bloody attacks and realised that Islam was a peaceful religion, said Walter Russell Mead on Saturday.
Mr Mead, who has never learned the meaning of the term “irony,” spent the next twenty minutes insisting that his comment was serious.
The US foreign policy expert and Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for the US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations was speaking at Jamia Ashrafia on “˜The Influence of Religion on the US Foreign Policy”.
The good ol’ CFR: “Making the world safe for jihad.”
Osama was not a true leader of Islam and his acts were against the teachings of Islam, he said. Mead said as far as war on terror was concerned, the American Muslims were not a problem, but a solution, since they could act as a bridge between Islam and West. Answering a question regarding the US support for military regime, he said there was not true democracy in Pakistan and the United States wanted to see Pakistan a truly democratic Muslim state with better socio-economic conditions. Religion was never a controversial issue in the world and religious education was being given everywhere, including the US, Mead said.
What planet was this talk given on? “Religion was never a controversial issue”? You can’t make this stuff up.