Obama’s Mosque Visit: Wrong Message, Wrong Venue By:Srdja Trifkovic
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/obamas-mosque-visit-wrong-message-wrong-venue
President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preaching radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny.
OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country—we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths . . . We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.”
FACTS: The implication is that Islam (with over 3,000 active mosques) is under attack in America, and that Obama’s “fellow Christians” are the culprits who need to listen. Since 9/11 89 Americans have been killed in 48 separate attacks of deadly Islamic terror in the U.S. while one Muslim was killed in an apparent “revenge” attack during the same period. Only Muslims routinely target members of other faiths on American soil. The number of Muslims involved in terrorism in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2015: it more than doubled over 2014. Two-thirds of them were born in America. The resulting public perceptions are not based on prejudice or bias, but on reason and empirical evidence.
OBAMA: “Muslim Americans keep us safe. They are our police. They are our fire fighters. They’re in (the Department of) Homeland Security.” The President added that Muslims don’t hear “thank you” enough.
FACTS: Proportionately very few Muslims become police officers, which is unsurprising considering that seven-in-ten U.S. Muslims (69%) say religion is very important in their lives, and are therefore reluctant to serve in enforcing man-made, Kufr (“infidel”) laws. It is seldom reported that, in view of many non-Muslim officers, their Muslim colleagues’ motives, loyalty and commitment are open to doubt. The situation is even more troubling at DHS: in 2010 Obama appointed Egyptian-born Muslim Brotherhood supporter Mohamed Elibiary as senior member of its Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC). He resigned in 2014, after indisputable evidence of his core loyalties had come to light. That evidence had been freely available during his vetting process.
OBAMA: “By the way, Thomas Jefferson’s opponents tried to stir things up by suggesting he was a Muslim—so I was not the first,” [laughter]. “I’m in good company.”
FACTS: In relation to Islam Thomas Jefferson is best remembered for his flat refusal to pay tribute to Barbary Coast Muslim pirates—the chief source of international terrorism of its time—and for ordering U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods that belonged to them. Jefferson’s Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom was designed to protect all faiths—“the Jew and the gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan”—with the last being an entirely hypothetical consideration designed to show “how far tolerance and equal civil rights extends.” During the 1790 presidential campaign Jefferson nevertheless declared that “the few . . . Jews, Mahomedans, Atheists or Deists among us” must, in the name of prudence and justice, be excluded “from our publick offices.” For him, the notion that a Muslim could be a citizen was an abstraction.
Obama’s chronic Islamophilia is of a different order of magnitude. His “humorous” attempt to conflate mythical “suggestions that Jefferson was a Muslim” with the well-founded suggestion that Obama’s family roots and early childhood experiences have decisively shaped his views of Islam is disingenuous and deceitful. Some of his memorable quotes (“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” to the UN General Assembly in September 2012; “The sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer,” and “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed,” in Cairo in 2009) are light years away from anything any of the Founding Fathers had ever said, written, or thought. The doubts about Obama’s core loyalties are still present because of his words and acts (notably his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2013), not because of bigotry or prejudice.
OBAMA: “Let’s start with this fact: For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace.”
FACTS: There is no “message of peace” in Islam, as I have repeatedly pointed out in these pages over the years. Let me summarize: The word genocide was not even coined when Allah “declared,” and Muhammad conveyed: “When we decide to destroy a population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life and yet transgress; so that Allah’s word is proved true against them: then we destroy them utterly.” (Kuran 17, 16-17) Infidels “we utterly destroyed because of their inequities, setting up in their place other peoples.” (21:11) In his own lifetime, Muhammad established the model for subsequent relations between Islamic conquerors and their Christian or Jewish subjects: “Fight those who do not profess the true faith (Islam) till they pay the jizya (poll tax) with the hand of humility.” (9:29) That Islam sees the world as an open-ended conflict between the Land of Peace (Dar al-Islam) and the Land of War (Dar al-Harb) is Muhammad’s key legacy. Ever since his time Islam has been a permanent challenge to all non-Muslim polities around it. Muhammad’s practice and encouragement of bloodshed are unique in the history of religions. Murder, pillage, rape, and more murder are in the Kuran and in the Traditions have impressed his followers “with a profound belief in the value of bloodshed as opening the gates of Paradise” (Ibn Warraq) and prompted countless Muslim governors, caliphs, and viziers to refer to Muhammad’s example to justify their mass killings, looting, and destruction. “Kill, kill the unbelievers wherever you find them” is a divine injunction both unambiguous and powerful. The spread of Islam, historically, has been due to its constant use of unrestrained violence, not to the people being “drawn to its message” of their own free will.
Towards the end of his Baltimore speech Obama said that anyone who suggested that the United States was at war with Islam not only legitimized such groups as the Islamic State but also played into their hands. “That kind of mindset helps our enemies,” he added. “It helps our enemies recruit. It makes us all less safe.”
Obama’s assertions and Obama’s mindset helps America’s enemies and makes us all less safe. It prevents the development of an effective antiterrorist strategy at home and abroad. It promotes a systemic misunderstanding of Islam, its legacy, its methods and its ambitions, all of which can only serve the ends of those who hope to make America, Europe and the rest of the world Sharia-compliant by the end of this century.
In the person of Obama, the liberal-secular antipathy to Christianity of old standing has converged with the PC speech code of recent decades and his own personal idiosyncrasies to produce a political climate wherein it is increasingly difficult to discuss the true nature of Islam. Obama now declares that it is not only tantamount to thought-crime, and an attack on what he calls “American values,” but also a threat to national security to respond with facts and reason. His axiomatic assertion that Islam is a religion of peace (“let’s start with facts”) leaves exactly zero room for meaningful dialogue. The hypocrisy of “mainstream” Muslim leaders hosting him is of course predictable, and condoned by the openly deceitful nature of their creed (taqqiya).
The abuse of America’s hospitality by an alien and eminently un-American creed-cum-radical-ideology was initially justified, by the elite class, by sensitivity, multiculturalism, and “human rights.” With Obama it has progressed to the claim that this violent, mind-numbing dogma is as American as apple pie. The pathology is rooted in the adamant refusal of our post-national, secular-liberal elite to perceive their country as a real community, rooted in the continuity of shared memories and cultural legacies. They refuse to treat America as a coherent polity that ultimately belongs to the majority of people inhabiting her and bearing her name. The reluctance to read the riot act to the unassimilable newcomers who abuse the host-nations’ hospitality, starting with the arrests and swift deportations of all illegal and law-breaking immigrants, now extends to both sides of the Atlantic. In both cases it is likely to have fatal consequences, and Barack Hussein Obama will be remembered as a key culprit. Some legacy . . .
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