“In an effort to find common ground with Islam”¦” — Barack Obama, in his Cairo Outreach Speech
Did anyone among all those who busied themselves with draft after draft after draft of The Speech That Will Live In Infamy check those Qur’anic quotes? Did they understand that those who knew the text would, as Robert Spencer devastatingly did the other day at this site, recognize the plucking completely out of context of a phrase or two from what turned out to be bloodcurdling passages from the Qur’an? Did they not realize that it did not take Spencer, but that you and I, and practically anyone at this point, could see that the quoting of 5.32 without 5.33 was simply to repeat the hideous misunderstanding of that misunderestimator of Islam, George Bush?
Did they think no one among the educated and the self-educated would be able to go through that speech and find all the offenses to language and the truth? For when it comes to Islam, because of the now easily apprehended atrociousness of the Western press, radio and television in its coverage of Islam, many are educating themselves on this matter, and are no longer to be among the easily fooled. Obama’s greatest gift is the gift of the gab. His private and lengthy tutorials from his mother and his grandparents have stood him in good stead. But that if the gab, no matter how well delivered (and with a voice so gravely and deeply satisfying it could be rented for AT & T commercials), is no longer in the realm of the merely debatable, but is simply false, then some heads should roll. And Obama’s gab was full of falsenesses that can be diligently pointed out, and re-pointed out, so that those who wish to defend his every move will have a hard time when he utters not merely something one may disagree with, but that is the kind of nonsense to which that Homeric epithet “arrant” is applied.
Those heads that should roll should start with those who think that misrepresentation of Islam to the world’s non-Muslims is acceptable and tolerable, because there appears to be no other way to these speechwriters to make a pitch to the “world’s Muslims.” This is a curious idea, since we are constantly told by Muslim apologists (and this is echoed by some in the Administration) that “Islam is not monolithic.” Yet Obama has certainly expressed, with the very idea of the speech, that in many ways…it is monolithic. Such misrepresentation is neither acceptable nor tolerable at this moment in the life of this, our too-heedless, too-ill-informed, and therefore much-too-needlessly imperiled civilisation which, despite its many faults, and the unworthiness of so many of its current inhabitants, should be preserved. Its legacy should not be negligently allowed to crumble by those who have in it, each of them, a life estate, and who must think of their heirs and assigns.
What “common ground with Islam” could Obama possibly mean? That we are all God’s chillun, bien entendu, but that doesn’t take us very far. If someone had said during World War II that the Nazis are “all God’s chillun'” (well, words to that effect) and we had to reach out to them, had to understand, and show how much sympathy we had for them, what would have been the reaction? Just look at the sympathy Chamberlain and Daladier showed for Hitler’s deep concern for the “legitimate rights of the Sudeten people” at Munich, and how that looked a few years later. If someone had said that the Japanese militarists who were slashing and burning and raping their way through northern China and Korea and much of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were also splendid fellows to whom we could appeal, we would know just how far that would get us.
When Obama speaks of “common ground,” one wishes to ask him, a former lecturer on Constitutional Law, what he thinks are the parts of the American Constitution that are consonant with, that could be endorsed by, those who believe in the Shari’a or Holy Law of Islam. Let’s stick to what are surely his three favorite parts of that Constitution, the ones to which he undoubtedly gave the most attention: the First, the Fifth, and the Fourteenth Amendments. What does he think of the Muslim view of free speech, not only in Muslim lands, but in non-Muslim lands where Muslims, through death threats and U.N. resolutions, are attempting to shut down all critical discussion of Islam? What does he think of the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses, not only as they are observed in the United States, but how they are, even without the benefit of the American Constitution, essentially observed all over the Western world? Does he think that non-Muslims over the past 1350 years, in their own lands, subsequently conquered by Muslims, have been allowed the Free Exercise of Religion under Muslim rule? Can he think of any reason why those not immediately forced to convert to Islam at the point of a sword might, subsequently, have had to endure campaigns of forced conversions (as were the Copts in Egypt, intermittently, and some Jews and Christians in Iran, and North Africa), or converted in order to escape the onerous conditions that all non-Muslims necessarily had to endure under Muslim rule? And if he claims that that was then, and this is now, should one not direct him to the treatment of Christians, Jews, Hindus, the few remaining Zoroastrians in Iran, the few remaining Buddhists in Bangladesh, in all the lands where Muslims rule, right now, right in this century and in the last?
Does he want to ignore history and the truth? What’s more, does he, and do others who advise him, who are at the end of their policy-making tether, grasp exactly why the wars in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight “terrorists” and to prop up the moderate extremists against the extreme extremists of Islam are so wasteful of Infidel resources? Do they know why they involve still greater and seemingly endless transfers of Infidel wealth to the Muslim lands? They do not. They are also so stupid because they ignore the essential violence and aggression of societies suffused with Islam.
They ignore the chance to exploit the pre-existing fissures within the Camp of Islam that could do so much to weaken that Camp, if only the Infidels removed themselves from the midst of these potentially warring groups of Muslims, intervening only intermittently to make sure that there is no attainment or successful deployment of weapons of mass destruction.
And if that were understood, and if the real center of the Jihad were understood as the countries of Western Europe, then we might concentrate our efforts on recognizing, and working to check in a thousand clever and not-very-expensive ways the instruments of Jihad that are deployed in Western Europe. For Western Europe is the historic heart of the West, and is America’s military ally, so essential for its survival (along with such outliers as still-sensible Australia, and (much-put-upon and beleaguered) Israel. The Jihad in Western Europe is supported by Arab, chiefly Saudi, money, and with all the influence that the Islamintern at the U.N. and its army of Western hirelings in all the capitals of the West can offer.
The instruments of Jihad that now must be addressed are the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da’wa (carefully targeted at the economically and psychically marginal, especially in prison), and demographic conquest. These can be halted, and even reversed, with some policies that represent the absolute minimum a country and a civilisation can put in place to defend itself.
Perhaps Barack Obama should be asked to read over the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the U.N. adopted (and which Iran — the Iran under the Shah — actually subscribed to). One of the careful authors of the UN Human Rights Declaration was the Lebanese Christian statesman Charles Malik, who as a Christian was one of Islam’s victims. Malik was formally Greek Orthodox, but he possessed the attitudes, the firmness toward Islam, of a Maronite. Obama should look carefully at the individual rights shown such solicitude, and then he should compare those documents, that overlap so much, with the Isamic attempt to present a version that would not be recognized for what it is — one based on the primacy of the Shari’a, and thus, one in which all the most important provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are removed. The Cairo Declaration, as it is called, represents not merely an “Islamic version” of the Universal Declaration, but is in fact a celebration of Islam and its collectivism, and its refusal to accord to individual Muslims the right to, for example, change their religion for another or for unbelief. The Cairo Declaration refuses to accord legal equality to non-Muslims. Such equality has never ever been part of Islam and shows no signs of becoming so now.
This is not a matter of nuance, or emphasis, or opinion. It is a matter of fact. The Shari’a flatly contradicts in letter and spirit the most important provisions of the American Constitution; it offers a collectivist faith, based on the view of Believers as “slaves of Allah” who are never to use their own judgment, or develop themselves morally or mentally, but are simply to accept, without questioning, the Rules of Islam: What Is Commanded, and What Is Prohibited. And Islam itself is suffused with the idea of a state of permanent war (though not always of open warfare) with all non-Muslims, for non-Muslims have no right to retain, or to set up obstacles, to the spread and then the dominance of Islam. Islam is collectivist, the West individualist.
And if the view of man is different, so is the political theory of Islam. Since men are merely “slaves of Allah,” they are to do what Allah commands, and what he commands can be found in the Qur’an, and glossed by the Sunna (the practices of Muhammad and his contemporaneous followers, whose customs and manners are preserved in written form in the Hadith and the Sira).
That is, Muslims — to the extent that they are good Muslims, who take their Islam seriously — must always locate the legitimacy of a political system in the closeness with which it adheres to the requirements of Islam. In the Western world we locate political legitimacy in the extent to which a government adheres to the will expressed by the people. In Islam, political legitimacy depends on how closely the ruler or government adheres to the will expressed by Allah in the Qur’an. Is this recognized by Obama and those who advise him on Islam? Or do they think that they can pretend otherwise? Do they hope to fool many of the world’s Muslims into changing, somehow, what they actually believe? Do they think they can fool Muslims into changing what the texts of Islam inculcate, what the long-established tenets insist upon, and what any society suffused with Islam will naturally express? For alas, any society at all, Muslim or non-Muslim, will always contain far more primitive people than the non-primitive, the ones who, in the case of Islam, might understand the need to get beyond the mental and moral straitjacket of Islam. Given that we are all primitives, it is important that the reigning ideology be, as in the West with Christianity (or Judeo-Christianity, a recent coinage that does give Judaism its proper historic due), a largely benign one.
All Obama has to do is call upon two groups to meet with him. One would consist of the most articulate and intelligent of the apostates, the Defectors from the Army of Islam. Perhaps Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, offering differing ethnic backgrounds — Somali, Arab, Pakistani, Iranian — for those who, like Barack Obama, pay a lot of attention to that kind of thing. And then a group of scholars, not the noah-feldmans and john-espositos, but scholars of American Constitutional Law who have proven themselves to be quick studies, and who can, in a summer of reading, learn enough about the doctrines of Islam to be able to advise, without any vested interest, venal or careerist (see Feldman, see Esposito), in misrepresenting Islam. Cass Sunstein comes to mind. And there are so many others who, if they set their mind to it, could take in the texts, study the Western scholars of Islam (Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Lammens, Jeffrey, and so on), and perhaps as well the clear understanding of Islam displayed by those who had both studied its doctrines and seen its observable effects on the behavior of Muslims. John Quincy Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Winston Churchill all come swimmingly to mind.
Let those American legal scholars present to Barack Obama and to others in his Administration a little seminar on Islam. Let them present, side by side, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Cairo (“Islamic”) Declaration of Human Rights. They can, if they wish, assign their most intelligent third-year students to help out in the preparation of materials — noting all the differences, and what those differences signify.
It might appeal to Barack Obama, and to that side of him which may be genuinely, and not merely ostentatiously and falsely, “judicious” and “thoughtful.” He needs this seminar. And the country needs him, and Hillary Clinton, and Robert Gates, and many others among those who presume to be able to protect and instruct us, to attend this seminar. No time to waste.