I’m very grateful for Andy Bostom’s generous PJM review of my new book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy — more details about which are on my website, AndrewCMcCarthy.com.
Like most Americans, though, I’m not so grateful that the Obama administration remains in the grip of Spring Fever, unwilling or unable to apprehend that the mayhem raging through the Middle East is easily explained by the fact that, in that part of the world, Islamic supremacism is the mainstream ideology. It is not a fringe ideology of “violent extremists,” and it is anything but moderate.
The administration cannot even bring itself to admit that the murder of our Ambassador and three other Americans in Libya was a coordinated, pre-planned attack by trained jihadists — the point of the Islamic supremacist spear. Obama officials continue, absurdly, to insist that the atrocity was the result of spontaneous rioting provoked by an obscure YouTube video. Worse, in a shocking betrayal of the president’s duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution’s principle of free speech, the administration has now taken what is patently retaliatory (il)legal action against the video-maker.
In fact, the administration does not even get the rationale behind the exploitation of this video, said to portray Mohammed in an unflattering light, as the latest pretext for barbarically disproportionate Muslim mayhem. It is not about a video, any more than similar episodes in recent years have been about cartoons, teddy-bears, accidental Koran burnings, etc. It is about Islamic supremacist ideology, the driving imperative of which is to impose sharia, Islam’s totalitarian societal system — rendered as such by centuries of scholarship, which, as I recount in Spring Fever, is captured in Reliance of the Traveller, a sharia manual bearing the endorsements of the faculty at Cairo’s al-Azhar University (the seat of Sunni learning since the 10th Century) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Muslim Brotherhood think-tank in the U.S. Under this repressive interpretation of sharia — which is mainstream in the Muslim Middle East — any critical examination of Islam and its prophet is considered blasphemy punishable by severe penalties, including death. That is the cause of the rioting. The video is just an excuse.
Will the president ever acknowledge this? Doubtful. The Wall Street Journal reports that, with respect to the anti-American rioting, Obama has sought help from his good friend Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist prime minister of Turkey. As Spring Fever recounts, Erdogan denies there is any such thing as “moderate Islam” (he says such a suggestion is an insult to Muslims), and he regards efforts to get Muslims to assimilate in Western societies as “a crime against humanity.” According to a report in the Turkish press today, Erdogan also says “Islamophobia” should also be prosecuted as a “crime against humanity,” and in that regard, he plans to speak out against the video when he appears at the UN General Assembly meeting later this month.
Exactly what kind of help Obama expects to get from Erdogan is unclear.
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