By Rabbi Aryeh Spero
There appears to be a battle raging within Barack Obama. How this war
is resolved will decide how we fight the war on terror and determine
if we win it at all. In his speech last spring in Cairo, Mr. Obama
said, "I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the
United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever
they appear." Defending the honor of Islam and protecting Muslims is
one of the goals that Barack Obama has set for himself. It constitutes
a personal definition of his presidency. But is he doing so to the
point of misleading the public in general, and at the risk of
jeopardizing the American people in particular?
The near-deaths of three hundred people on Christmas due to an Islamic
terrorist plot -- an act of war against America -- did not rouse Obama
from golf and relaxation until three days later. When he finally
spoke, he disrespected us, as before, by claiming that this was a
"lone event" disconnected from anything larger. But most Americans
knew what it was, and the subsequent reports and al-Qaeda announcement
told us that this was an act of jihad, a part of the larger scheme of
radical Islam in its war against America.
After the Fort Hood massacre, the president's first reaction was to
intone the silly assertion that we "do not know what prompted this
outrage." In fact, everyone immediately intuited what was verified
more each day after the carnage: that devotion to the Islamic cause
generated Nidal Hasan's decision to kill American infidels. The
president was strangely unwilling to tie these murders to Islam or
jihad or imams, even knowing that the jihadist yelled "Allah aqbar" as
he mowed down innocent Americans.
In all these matters, Mr. Obama's first concern seems to protect
things Islamic rather than name and fight the Islamism intent on
destroying us. This attitude predates his presidency, and it is one of
the animating and personal goals of his worldview. Even before
becoming senator of Illinois, he tells us in The Audacity of Hope
(pp.261) of his earlier decision: "I will stand with them [Muslims]
should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." For Barack
Obama, the recognition that this is not simply generic "extremism," as
he likes to call it, but specific to Islam and carried out by devout
young Muslim men borders on the "ugly direction" against which he
promised to stand. But by so doing, Mr.Obama is misleading the country
and standing in the way of the measures needed to protect the American
people and win the war on terror.
What we get from the president after each incident is not a tough,
impassioned call to wipe out jihadists, but the warning that we
"should not rush to judgment" or draw any conclusions regarding Islam
or Muslims. The more Islamic terrorism, the more warnings we receive
from him not to mischaracterize Islam. But how can the American public
be accused of "rushing" to judgment when this has been happening
before our eyes for thirty years already? After decades of these
incidents -- and they are coming quicker now -- Obama expects us to
participate in his cover-up for Islam by immediately agreeing that
these attackers are either "alone," or "misfits," or "crazy." They are
not crazy, but devoted to a cause; not misfits, but fit into a very
large Islamist groupthink; not alone, but part of an ideology, most
often coordinated by Islamists and clerics higher up. These are agents
of Islamism on the same level as the German agents of Nazism who tried
to do damage within our borders during WWII. At least back then, the
safety of the home-front was more important to our leaders than
protecting "feelings."
Until President Obama acknowledges the Islamic context behind these
acts of worldwide jihad, we Americans remain at great risk. One cannot
vanquish what he does not believe is a culprit. And thus, the most
likely candidates setting out to kill us -- Islamic young and mostly
single men under 40 -- are not routinely checked, nor are the mosques
where many of these plans are hatched and coordinated. Obama and his
people are elevating and sanctifying the doctrine of "no profiling" as
if it were a fundamental principle of humankind more important than
life itself. A society that suspends analytical and rational judgment
in favor of a politically correct fantasy is on the road to
unscientific darkness and eventual suicide. One hopes that Mr. Obama
is guided by foolishness only and nothing more.
Barack Obama's failure to tell the truth about Islamism goes beyond
the routine excuse-making of the politically correct ideology that has
negatively infected our country. Mr. Obama's preoccupation here is
personal. Though not a practicing Muslim, nor a visibly practicing
Christian, in office, he has a cultural and ethnic fidelity to Islam
that skews common sense and is resulting in harm to our nation. After
all, Islam is a culture in which Obama was raised. It represents to
him what Americanism and the Judeo-Christian ethos represent to us who
were raised in them. Obama grew up in Islamic Indonesia from age 6 to
12 -- formative years, the years in which the subconscious is molded
--and he seems to have liked it very much.
"One of the prettiest sounds on Earth," as Obama told The New York
Times in March of 2007, "is the Moslem call to prayer." Such warmth of
identification is to be expected concerning those things that supply a
childhood. As a youngster, Obama was identified as a Muslim, and he
spent two hours a day in elementary school studying Islam. He seems
unwilling to move beyond his youthful, rose-colored view of a
more-secular Islam to today's facts. He remains fixed in his
adoration, as demonstrated during his Cairo tour, when he referred to
the Quran as the "Holy Quran." He never waxes that way about our
Constitution, for that was not his mother's milk. The dozens of
citations in the Quran allowing murder and mayhem are to Obama not
organic, whereas the allowance in our Constitution for the now-defunct
system of slavery sours him on its entirety. Yet for Obama, the Quran
is not stigmatized, even with its numerous references and validations
of slavery and its continuance of slavery even today by those who cite
its authority.
In another address, Obama spoke not of Islam as a religion, but The
Islam, The Path, as would someone who sees in it something
transcendent. Never has he waxed reverent about America's
accomplishments as he has about Islam's contributions to the world or
his concoction of Islam's enormous contribution to the development of
the United States.
The utter lack of pain and passion in Obama's non-emotional responses
to both the Fort Hood massacre and the Christmas scare was striking.
He spoke of it as he would a highway bill. I'm sure he is not happy,
yet it doesn't seem to be personal. Contrast this with how he reacted
and condemned the Cambridge police at Harvard regarding Professor
Gates. He appeared to be affected -- because he was. And yet,
Professor Gates was not terrorized as were the passengers aboard the
Delta flight, who thought they would soon die.
All this rhetoric about not "profiling" (which is simply the use of
rational judgment) and about not blaming Islam may sound
"enlightened," but for Obama, it constitutes verbal weapons in defense
of Islam. His war is not for victory over jihadism, but to defend the
honor of Islam under today's difficult circumstances. For him, it is a
balancing act between the Islam he loves and the duties imposed on him
by the presidency.
It is hard to shed the teachings, culture, and religious life of one's
youth. And the Islamic world is Obama's world. Much of his ethnicity
and the people that are natural to him derive from it. Obama cannot
conceive of a clash of civilizations where the one intent on
destroying the civilization he's supposed to protect is Islam, his
Islam. Obama will not allow sensible military rules of engagement that
give maximum and routine protection for our soldiers if by so doing,
some Afghan Muslims will lose their lives. He seems to identify with
those people as much as he does our young Americans. He does not allow
the necessary profiling of young, single Islamic men because he thinks
of how that would make some of his own family members feel, as well as
how the young Barack Obama would have felt. Those feelings are
understandable for Barack Obama, private citizen, but not for a
president of the United States.
Today's global mayhem and chaos is not from Basque terrorism. We
Americans tolerate intrusive measures at airport check-ins not out of
fear of another Timothy McVeigh or white neo-Nazis, as the ACLU wants
us to believe. That's a deliberate obfuscation -- one that the
president is endorsing -- and such obfuscation and denial invite
danger. The jihadist relishes striking on Christmas specifically,
since it is the goal of jihad to profane and degrade Christian and
Jewish sacred time and sacred objects. Islam sees this as a contest
between religions. Had we been allowed to acknowledge the Islamic
content behind current terrorism, we would have been on especially
high alert on Christmas Day.
Last November, we elected our first president with Islamic affinities
and familial ties. The problem is that today's clash is with Islam. We
need a president whose first loyalty and cultural empathy is to and
with Americans. We don't have that in President Obama. He cannot
forever dally and hide behind new "commissions" that have nothing new
to tell us regarding what must be done. Obama must soon choose between
his emotional need to protect Islam and his presidential requirement
to protect the American people. Unfortunately for him, the two are not
compatible.