Sound and Fury in Cairo

At least 95% of Barack Hussein Obama’s speech yesterday in Cairo was feel-good boilerplate. It was mostly a batch of unremarkable oats for the nose-bags of all those Birkenstockers and Trustafarians back in the United States who were responsible for his election.

But as for the rest… Well, most of the rest consisted of blatant pandering to the “Muslim World”. And there were a few scary parts, such as this sentence, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam:

And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country — you, more than anyone, have the ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world. [emphasis added]

Let’s remake this world.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a fascist pronouncement. People who want to remake the world slide inexorably into totalitarianism, because they have to act against that annoying and persistent impediment known as “human nature”. The 20th century was strewn with millions of corpses in mass graves and killing fields as the result a variety of ideologies that attempted to remake the world.

Thank God for the ongoing financial crisis, which will serve to reduce the ability of Barack Hussein Obama to realize his grandiose dreams.

Other bloggers and writers have provided excellent analyses of this speech. Robert Spencer does the best job of fisking it at Jihad Watch, and Melanie Phillips and Caroline Glick have supplied their own pertinent commentary.

Mr. Obama said:

Now, much has been made of the fact that an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected President.

Actually, this topic was off-limits in polite society before the election. Pamela at Atlas Shrugs reminds us that much was not made of “Hussein”:

Obama deceitfully hid his Muslim background and schooling and his agenda. Little did America know that Obama’s objective would be a conversion of this nation to “the largest Muslim country in the world”.

The President spoke at length about the Arab-Israeli conflict, displaying the mealy-mouthed “moral equivalence” that so often characterizes the rhetoric of Western leaders:

For decades then, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive.

But not all of his examples were this even-handed. As Yid With Lid points out, the President singled out the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism without even hinting at the single greatest sinkhole of anti-Semitism in our own time: the Muslim Middle East.

Mr. Obama also proudly cited the Koran:

The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as — it is as if he has killed all mankind.

The passage referred to above is part of 5:32:

Therefore We prescribed for the Children of Israel that whoso slays a soul not to retaliate for a soul slain, nor for corruption done in the land, shall be as if he had slain mankind altogether; and whoso gives life to a soul, shall be as if he has given life to mankind altogether. Our Messengers have already come to them with the clear signs; then many of them thereafter commit excesses in the earth.

The President neglected to mention the verse immediately following it (5:33), which says:
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This is the recompense of those who fight against God and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land. That is a degradation for them in this world; and in the world to come awaits them a mighty chastisement.

This text is bad enough in itself , but it should also be noted that the phrase “those who fight against God and His Messenger” is widely interpreted by mainstream Islamic scholars to mean anyone who opposes Muslims and resists the spread of Islam.

Yet if you believe Barack Hussein Obama, Islam means “tolerance”. He said:

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. That is the spirit we need today. People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it’s being challenged in many different ways.

Let’s overlook the putative tolerance of the past and consider the facts on the ground right now, in the tenth year of the 21st century. If Islam is so tolerant, why have we seen all the Muslim-majority countries — Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, etc. — steadily drained of their Christian, Jewish, and Hindu populations?

Stories like this one from Asia News have become more and more frequent in Islamic countries under the influence of Salafist doctrine:

Non-Muslims in villages along the northern Afghan-Pakistani border are forced to pay the jizya. Lashkar-e-Islam wants a thousand rupee per adult male to allow non-Muslims to live there with the right to travel. In Orakzai area the Taliban take over two stores and various houses owned by Sikhs. Some families are forced to pay up to 20 million rupees in order to stay.

Non-Muslims have to pay if they want to retain their religion and live among Muslims.

It’s worth noting that exactly the same system was in force in Cordoba and Andalusia a thousand years ago, during the “Golden Age of Islam”.

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A couple of Gates of Vienna readers have contributed their own observations about the President’s speech. First a reaction to this passage from the speech:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

This is Fjordman’s response:

Is there even a single truthful statement in this entire paragraph? Perhaps they had some nice calligraphy, and a few Muslim scholars, especially al-Khwarizmi and Omar Khayyam, made contributions to algebra, but apart from that it’s almost total nonsense. The magnetic compass was invented by the Chinese, and possibly by Europeans independently. Printing of books was invented by the Chinese and stubbornly and persistently rejected by Muslims for a thousand years or more due to Islamic religious resistance. Al-Azhar focused on Islamic religious learning — sharia law — not on natural philosophy or science, as did European universities. This is why arguably the greatest original scientific work ever written in the Arabic language, Alhazen’s Book of Optics, was written in Cairo but almost totally ignored in the Arabic-speaking world afterward, including at al-Azhar in Cairo. It was studied in Europe.

Modern algebra, too, was developed in Europe. Muslim scholars did not understand how disease spread or how it could be cured. This was proved in late nineteenth century Europe with scholars such as the great Frenchman Louis Pasteur and the German Robert Koch. The germ theory of disease could only be proven after the creation of sufficiently powerful microscopes. The microscope was an exclusively European invention with no known equivalent anywhere else in the world.

Concerning Islamic charitable giving, or zakat, the President said:

For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.

A reader sent this response by email:

Given that we know that zakat is used “for Allah’s cause” (i.e. for mujahideen, those fighting in holy battle, jihad), could BHO’s support for it — if he proposes legislation to that effect — be grounds for impeachment in that he is failing to protect the US since zakat is inherently seditious against non-Islamic governments and their peoples?

Of course, it would also be grounds for any congressmen/women to oppose such legislation, so it is essential that we get this info out on as many sites as possible.

Also, if we can put this point across about zakat, it can form the basis of suing mosques and other recipient organizations of zakat, as third-parties in legal cases against Islamic terrorism. I noticed a few years back a US court granted in favor of people whose relatives had been killed by Moslem terrorists and the US court found Iran ‘guilty’, but of course no costs could be recovered. If we can show that all mosques do collect zakat, then we have a basis for helping to dismantle the financial strength of jihad worldwide. These mosques and “charities” are the real conduits for terrorism; dismantle them with lawsuits and expose their seditious natures and that is half the battle.

Shariah Finance Watch is thinking along the same lines: any laws that are passed to enable shariah finance are by definition unconstitutional, and are vulnerable on First Amendment grounds.

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There is much, much more that could be said about yesterday’s speech in Cairo. Whole dissertations could be written about the dissimulations, exaggerations, and untruths contained in Mr. Obama’s words.

However, I’ll leave it at that for now.

I’d like to think this is the last bit of pandering to Islam that we will see from our current president. Unfortunately, it’s in all likelihood just the beginning of his administration’s plunge into complete dhimmitude.


The illustration at the top is from Jyllands-Posten. Thanks to TB for the tip.