Presidential Message, Ramadan 2008
White House News
I send greetings to Muslims observing Ramadan in America and around the globe.
The holy month of Ramadan is a special time of prayer, fasting, and service. For Muslims, these days commemorate the revelation of God’s word to the prophet Muhammad in the form of the Qur’an.
I thank the men and women of the Muslim community for their contributions to America. Your love of family, and gratitude to God have strengthened the moral fabric of our country. Our Nation is stronger and more hopeful because of the generosity, talents, and compassion of our Muslim citizens.
Laura and I send our best wishes. Ramadan Mubarak.
GEORGE W. BUSH
I could write an Errata Sheet to this little missive. But the real Errata Sheet would require the entire thing to be eliminated, and the practice of this Ramadan well-wishing, a recent one which I believe was instituted by Bush himself after the 9/11/2001 attacks, and in response to them, was a very bad idea.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has picked it up as well. “Ramadan,” he said in a recent statement issued in praise of Ramadan, “teaches patience and humility, and reminds us of our shared moral universe; our obligation to others.”
There is no “shared moral universe” when one of the sharers is Islam, or adherents of Islam. They do not — Ali Sina has an excellent comment on this at faithfreedom.org — observe or even think it worth trying to observe the Golden Rule. They are taught to regard the essential division of humanity to be that between Muslim and non-Muslim, Believer and Infidel. They are taught that there must be uncompromising hostility between the two. And the ultimate goal of all Muslims should be to make sure that all obstacles to the spread and then the dominance of Islam are removed. Non-Muslims under Muslim rule will be given a choice: death, conversion, or — in the best case — life as a dhimmi, which means a life of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity. This humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity may be relieved now and again only by a benevolent ruler who might relax the rules (see Akbar) for a time — that is, he might, for a time, be a Muslim willing not to behave as a thorough-going Muslim.
What does Gordon Brown mean by a “shared moral universe”? What, aside from monotheism, do Christians and Jews share with Muslims? And how important is that, really? Do Christians and Jews have more, or less, to fear from presumably polytheistic Hindus than from monotheistic Muslims?
He knows the answer to that.
In Bush’s statement, meanwhile, that phrase “Our Nation is stronger and more hopeful because of the generosity, talents, and compassion of our Muslim citizens” gives a false impression. It is false. It is dangerous. If Muslims demonstrate “compassion” to anyone other than fellow Muslims, they do so not because of Islam, but despite it. If Muslims show generosity to anyone other than fellow Muslims, they do so not because of Islam, but despite it. If Muslims show “talents,” that is so often only because outside of Dar al-Islam they are allowed to exist in a society that is not suffused with the habit of mental submission, nor with severe constraints on free and skeptical inquiry, nor on means of artistic expression. They live in a world in which, for example, Muslim females can do things that would be impossibly difficult or impossible in an Islam-suffused state — and that too is because this country is not Muslim.
He, Bush, and the team of speechwriters that work on this kind of thing for days at a time — god, official Washington is full of such tedious mediocrities — could at the very least have excised that last, mendacious and dangerous, paragraph.
Then it would read:
I send greetings to Muslims observing Ramadan in America and around the globe.
The holy month of Ramadan is a special time of prayer, fasting, and service. For Muslims, these days commemorate the revelation of God’s word to the prophet Muhammad in the form of the Qur’an.
Laura and I send our best wishes. Ramadan Mubarak.
GEORGE W. BUSH
That’s enough. That’s more than enough.