In Human Events this morning:
Here are the ten most likely mistakes Barack Obama will almost certainly make during his upcoming trip to the Islamic world:
1. He will probably reiterate his call to Israel to stop all civilian population growth in West Bank settlements, under the assumption that further territorial concessions by the Israelis, and ultimately the creation of a Palestinian state, will result at last in peace in the Middle East. Unfortunately, this view fails to take into account the intransigence and absolutism of the jihadist worldview held by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, and their puppetmasters in Damascus and Tehran. Israel’s foes will ultimately be satisfied by nothing less than the total destruction of the Jewish state, and just as the Gaza withdrawal of 2005 emboldened the jihadists rather than pacifying the area (as was widely assumed would be the result at the time), so further land concessions will only be seen as signs of weakness and of the need to step up jihad efforts.
2. He will remain mum, as he has up to now, about human rights abuses in Muslim countries. Even during his much-ballyhooed and long anticipated speech in Cairo this Thursday, he is unlikely to mention the ever-worsening plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who have not infrequently been victimized by Muslim gangs while police looked the other way. Obama would surprise the entire world by mentioning the persecution of Christians by jihadist groups in Iraq, which has led to over half that nation’s Christian population fleeing the country in recent years — but anyone placing money on the likelihood of the President’s mentioning that is setting himself up for a loss.
3. He will remain similarly mum about the plight of women in Islamic countries, even as a new study has shown that honor killings are much more frequent among Muslims in the West than was previously thought.
4. Obama will travel to Saudi Arabia, and even if he doesn’t bow to the Saudi king again, he is unlikely to say anything about the dire suppression of religious freedom in that country — or, upon his return home, to initiate any serious efforts to free us from foreign policy dependence upon Saudi oil, either by easing restrictions on drilling or by making a serious effort to develop viable alternative energy sources. Most pathetically, the American press will accompany him to Saudi Arabia and — for fear of arrest by the Saudis — surrender their First Amendment rights. The Saudis have warned US reporters to report only on Obama — on nothing else — or risk arrest and detention.
5. Continuing to hold the false assumption that poverty causes terrorism (which explains why there are so many Haitian suicide bombers), Obama is likely to announce more and more aid packages for Muslim countries, without tying this aid to any accountability. He will do this despite the fact that billions of dollars has been given to Pakistan since September 11 in order to help that country fight the jihad terrorists, and yet a good deal of that money ended up in the hands of those very terrorists.
6. Regarding Iran, Obama will probably continue his conciliatory tone, even though the mullahs have taken his outstretched hand as an indication of his naivete, and have responded to his kindness with increasing demands and bellicosity.
7. He is unlikely to make any serious effort to impede Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or to allow the Israelis to do so, although their very survival as a nation is threatened if Iran does manage to build a nuclear bomb.
8. Obama will continue with his efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, heedless of how his moral indignation over Gitmo not only is unwarranted by anything that actually happened there, but also of how it validates the anti-American propaganda that jihadists have been spreading in the Islamic world for years.
9. If he really apologizes for the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, as some news reports have indicated, he will embolden jihadists the world over in their conviction that American power is inherently corrupt, and must be resisted at all costs.
10. By continuing to emphasize the discontinuity between his presidency and that of George W. Bush, he will only strengthen the self-serving arguments of those who claim that the tensions in the world are America’s fault, and that only American action can ease them.