By Barry Rubin
The idea that President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim is ridiculous. (And don’t write me disagreeing because there’s no proof.)
BUT this red herring has blocked a serious discussion of what is Obama’s attitude toward Islam. As so often happens regarding the Middle East and Islam, people spend their time and passions focusing on the wrong issue.
I think two points can be made reasonably:
–Based on his youthful experience, Obama thinks he is a great expert on Islam. He isn’t. And the Islam he came in contact with at the time (in Indonesia mainly) was quite different from what he has to deal with in the Middle East today. Particularly, he genuinely does not seem to comprehend revolutionary Islamism. And since that’s the main international threat in the world today his failure creates a gigantic problem for the future of what used to be called the Free World.
–Obama has a strong sympathy and empathy for Muslims. In theory, that’s just fine but it has led to a policy of trying to win the love of the Muslim-majority world rather than to develop strategies that work and protect U.S. interests. Another theme that emerges from this is his relentless mirror-imaging in which Egypt’s revolution becomes equivalent to Rosa Parks protesting against segregation on buses in the Southern United States and the quest for democratic liberty by America’s Founding Fathers.
So Obama’s “Islamophilia” makes him have a huge “Muslim problem.” The problem is not that he “likes” Muslims but that he doesn’t distinguish among them. It’s the difference between loving Russia, its people and its culture a generation ago, and not understanding the problem of Communism.
By believing that the only problems are: a tiny group of evil people (al-Qaida) and mistakes made by U.S. policy, Obama is missing the biggest political development in the world today.
It’s like saying after the Russian Revolution that the real problem is a small group of anarchists who want to hijack Bolshevism, but that if the United States is only nice enough to the Communists, shows them that America isn’t their enemy, and helps them get rid of a few extremists everything will be great.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org.
For Obama, Muslims are a victim group, and he wants to save the victims of the world. That’s all he knows and all he needs to know.
He can’t be that dumb,can he? One can only hope so,because if not,the situation is even worse.
Dr. Rubin, what you are saying about Obama’s affinity for Islam and his apparent inability to distinguish among the more modern and less violent forms of Islam and medieval and far more violent and dangerous Islamism is that Obama for all his university credentials is essentially a rather shallow and uninformed individual.
I feel that Barack Obama is deeply impressed with himself. After all, lots and lots of really educated people, many of them with Phd.’s, have told him since he was young how impressive he is, so often and so articulately that Obama has come to believe it himself.
Barack Obama reminds of the book entitle,”Everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten.” A silly book of course, but this is where Obama apparently stopped learning and now runs into real problems, and not just with Islam. Obama really thinks he knows everything about everything, that his wisdom is unparallelled, and that he is the sharpest knife in the drawer, after all, he won the Presidential election with virtually no resume at all. But he remains shallow and uninformed about just about everything and has rammed through or managed to implement social, economic, and foreign policies which reflect this.
I have met people like this and they will never introspect or try to step outside their experiences and even try to see themselves as others do. Obama is not alone in this, many people lack insight and self criticism. But most people have at least some critical self understanding because they have to live in a real world and most people are very limited in their power to hurt others.
But Barack Obama is the President and he can do tremendous damage. Unfortunately Obama fully believes that he is really special, that he stands above the normal man. Sadly Obama cannot and will not tolerate even the slightest criticism, and worse, none of his acolytes will ever stand up and oppose him.
Hopefully, the more down to earth members of the Democrat Party will be able to rein Obama in, and prevent him at least from doing too much harm to Israel.
About the other stuff Obama has messed up, well God help them!