Post-American Presidency (27 page)

In keeping with Obama’s U.S.–Muslim Engagement Project, a charter of dhimmitude, we were to be conditioned to respect Muslim immigrants and accept their culture—and any suspicion regarding
terrorist activities among them was to be rejected for fear of being charged with “Islamophobia.”

Obama appeared to be more than comfortable with this deal with the devil as he abetted the replacement of America’s Judeo-Christian ethic with an Islamo-Christian ethic—which would ultimately destroy the very foundation of this country. Muslims persecute Christians in every country they finally dominate—never in world history have Muslims coexisted as equals with Christians in any Islamic land. The Christians are always subjugated as inferiors, in accord with directives of Islamic law that are still in place.

But none of that appears to be at all important to Barack Hussein Obama.

Why was this immense effort necessary? Columnist Burt Prelutsky said it best: “The Islamists have been actively at war with us for 30 years and generally at war with western civilization for well over a thousand years, and still we pay lip service to these people in a way we never did with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union. Is it because the Muslims commit sadism and murder in the name of religion and not country? If anything, I would think that would make their evil acts all the more contemptible.”
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HAJ GREETINGS FROM BARACK HUSSEIN

The Islamophilic president went so far as to issue a heartfelt special greeting and best wishes to the Muslim pilgrims in Mecca for the Haj… on Thanksgiving Day 2009. Obama asserted that “the rituals of Haj and Eid al-Adha both serve as reminders of the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world’s major religions.” And he noted: “Muslims around the world will celebrate Eid-al-Adha and distribute food to the less fortunate to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son out of obedience to God.”

In this Obama yet again exacerbated tensions instead of calming them. The Islamic Feast of Eid al-Adha commemorates the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca, the haj, and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son—Ishmael in the Muslim version. In thinking of Abraham, most Americans think of the biblical figure. In Genesis 22:15–18, Abraham is rewarded for his faith and told he will become a blessing to the nations: “By your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.”

But the Muslim audiences that Obama addressed in this message did not read Genesis. They read the Qur’an, in which Allah says that Abraham was an “excellent example” for the believers only when he told his pagan family that “there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred for ever, unless ye believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). The same verse says that Abraham is
not
an excellent example, however, when he tells his pagan father, “I will pray for forgiveness for you.”
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Thus the Qur’an, in its picture of Abraham—the man Obama invoked as the quintessential symbol of the common elements of the three faiths—held up hatred as exemplary, while belittling the virtue of forgiveness. Obama thereby reinforced a worldview that took for granted the legitimacy of everlasting enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims—and did so while attempting to build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims.

He also retained, as his chief liaison to the Islamic world, a defender of Sharia: the draconian Islamic law that mandates stoning of adulterers, amputation of thieves’ hands, and legal discrimination against women and non-Muslims.

DEFENDING SHARIA

Dalia Mogahed, Barack Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, appeared on British television in October 2009, where she said: “Sharia is not well understood and Islam as a faith is not well understood.” How have we misunderstood Islamic law? We have associated it with “maximum criminal punishments” and “laws that… to many people seem unequal to women.” The Western view of Sharia was “oversimplified,” said Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs; most Muslim women worldwide, she said, associate it with “gender justice.”

Here’s some gender justice straight out of the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book that forms the basis of Sharia. The Qur’an declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282). It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter (4:11). The Qur’an tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives (4:34). It also allows for marriage to prepubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4).

All these stipulations—about testimony, inheritance, wife beating, marriage, and divorce—remain part of Sharia to this day. So does the law that a wife must not refuse sex to her husband, no matter where or when he makes the demand. This is based on a saying of the Islamic prophet Muhammad: “If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e., to have sexual relations] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” And another: “By him in Whose Hand lies my life, a woman can not carry out the right of her Lord, till she carries out the right of her husband. And if he asks her to surrender herself [to him for sexual intercourse] she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle.”

Gender justice. And that’s not all. Mogahed, a member of the president’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, made
her defense of Sharia on a TV show hosted by a member of Hizb ut Tahrir. This is an international organization that is banned as a terrorist group in many nations, and which is openly dedicated to the worldwide imposition of Sharia and the destruction of all governments that are constituted according to any other political philosophy—including constitutional republics that do not establish a state religion.

On the show with Mogahed were two Hizb ut Tahrir representatives, who repeatedly attacked “man-made law” and the “lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism” one encounters in Western societies. They said Sharia should be “the source of legislation.” Not “a” source. “The” source.

Obama’s adviser Mogahed, for her part, offered no contradiction to any of this. Should an adviser to the president of the United States really have given her sanction to such a group? Apparently she has no problem with its goal, since instead of defending the American system of government, she maintained that Sharia was popular among Muslim women: “I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of Sharia than the common perception in Western media.”

On the same show, Dalia Mogahed described her job in the Obama administration as involving efforts “to convey… to the president and other public officials what it is Muslims want.” What Muslims want. Not what America might want from Muslims—i.e., a recognition of the ways in which Sharia contradicts the Constitution regarding the equality of all people before the law, and a forthright rejection of those elements of Sharia. No one, Muslim or non-Muslim, seems concerned about any challenge to those provisions from the adherents of Sharia.

Perhaps they should have listened more closely to Dalia Mogahed.

MUTUAL RESPECT?

Obama spoke often about establishing “mutual respect” with the Islamic world. But that respect seemed to be a one-way street. In denigrating his own country and retailing historical myths about the Islamic world, he was only augmenting the haughtiness that was a centerpiece of Islamic supremacism. In endeavoring at least ostensibly to take away the impetus for Islamic terrorism around the world, he was fueling some of its core assumptions: that America was an evil polity, responsible for the conflicts and tensions roiling the world; that Islam was a great civilization, destined to shine again as it once had in the misty distant past—a beacon of light to the world.

Barack Obama, son and stepson of two Muslims, raised a Muslim himself, seemed determined to be the engine of that resurgence.

What was peculiar in all this was that many who were raised Muslim but left Islam—scholars such as Ibn Warraq, politicians such as Ayaan Hirsi, doctors such as Wafa Sultan—were quite vocal about the violations of human rights, the misogyny, the oppression, the child marriages, that they witnessed in Muslim societies. Obama must have seen such things while growing up in the largest Muslim country in the world and attending Qur’anic classes and Islamic study. But they fight against these human-rights abuses, while he embraces the Islamic world uncritically. He respects it, human-rights abuses and all.

THE U.S.–MUSLIM ENGAGEMENT PROJECT: CHARTER FOR DHIMMITUDE

Why was Obama acting this way? The answer lay in his unshakable commitment to the U.S.–Muslim Engagement Project, a multifaceted initiative designed, in its own words, to “create a coherent, broad-based and bipartisan strategy and set of recommendations to improve
relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world; and communicate and advocate this strategy in ways that shift U.S. public opinion and contribute to changes in U.S. policies, and public and private action.”
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This strategy and series of recommendations was laid out in two principal documents. One was the George Soros–funded Report of the Leadership Group on U.S.–Muslim Engagement:
Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World
, from September 2008. The other was closely related to the U.S.–Muslim Engagement initiative:
The Doha Compact: New Directions: America and the Muslim World
, from the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World.
The Doha Compact
appeared in October 2008.

No outreach or integration of societies similar to that suggested in
Changing Course
and
The Doha Compact
is ever suggested in any official policy document for any other culture, or religion. Both of these documents, meanwhile, are generally silent about, if not downright hostile toward, the American commitment to Israel—except for their insistence upon the two-state
solution, which in reality amounts to nothing more than a call for the destruction of Israel, since a Palestinian state would be nothing more than a base for further jihad attacks against Israel. Pursuing this policy thus constitutes abandonment of a strategic ally in one of the most hostile and belligerent hotspots in the world—an ally that has been a cornerstone of U.S. diplomacy since the late 1940s, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, from Harry Truman going forward.

Jews, of course, should pay attention to all this, and understand that not only does it undermine the stability and security of the Jewish homeland, but it also has grave implications for Jews in America. For Islamic political influence is always hostile to the Jews, the worst enemies of the Muslims according to the Qur’an (5:82).

Obama’s adviser for Muslim affairs, Dalia Mogahed, is listed as
a member of the U.S.–Muslim Engagement Project’s “Leadership Group,” and is a signatory to the
Doha Compact.
Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy noted in March 2009 that
Changing Course
was being “aggressively promoted to the Obama administration and Congress by a number of its non-Muslim participants,” including former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who presented it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former congressman Vin Weber.
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Also part of the Leadership Group is Ingrid Mattson of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization that is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Brotherhood is, in its own words, dedicated in America to “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
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So committed was Obama to this strategy and course of action that two documents that set out in detail how this improvement of relations was to be achieved served as virtual templates for the post-American president’s action plan, rhetoric, and strategy. His statements hewed so closely to the recommendations in these documents that it sometimes seemed as if Obama’s speechwriters were lifting copy straight from the documents.

DICTATING OBAMA’S POLICY TOWARD THE ISLAMIC WORLD

Changing Course
, for example, called on the incoming president to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool for resolving key conflicts involving Muslim countries, engaging both allies and adversaries in dialogue” and to “engage with Iran to explore the potential for agreements
that could increase regional security, while seeking Iran’s full compliance with its nuclear nonproliferation commitments.” Obama has attempted indefatigably to do both. It further recommended that the new president “work intensively for immediate de-escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a viable path to a two-state solution, while ensuring the security of Israelis and Palestinians.”

This also was identical to Obama’s playbook, as were calls to “promote broad-based political reconciliation in Iraq, and clarify the long-term U.S. role,” “renew international commitment and cooperation to halt extremists’ resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan;” and “provide top-level U.S. leadership to resolve regional conflicts and to improve coordination with international partners.”

Changing Course
anticipated Obama’s language directly in calling upon the U.S. leader to “improve mutual respect and understanding between Americans and Muslims around the world.”
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The Doha Compact
likewise stated: “Repairing the rift between the United States and the Muslim world must begin with respect. Lack of mutual respect has been an important driver behind the deterioration of relations between the United States and the Muslim world since 9/11.”
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As we have seen, Obama often spoke of restoring “mutual respect” with the Islamic world, including in his Inaugural Address—in line with the
Changing Course
recommendation that the new president “speak to the critical importance of improving relations with the global Muslim community in his 2009 inaugural address.”
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