Priorities, Mr. President, Priorities:
Bobby Jindal on Friday released a statement responding to the president’s remarks on Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast in which he cautioned Americans from getting on a “high horse” when taking a stance against radical Islam because people have committed “terrible deeds” in the name of Christianity, too.
“It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”
And note this interesting moment during Mr. Obama’s speech, as transcribed by the Washington Post:
“No God condones terror, no grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number,” he said. “We are summoned to push back against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends.”
As Robert Spencer writes at Jihad Watch:
Wait, what? He said, “our religion”? Back in 2008, when he referred to “my Muslim faith,” it was dismissed as a slip of the tongue. But now, if this AP report is accurate in quoting him, this is two “slips of the tongue” in the same direction — along with six years of foreign and domestic policies that aid and enable the advance of jihad and Islamic supremacism.
Of course, what Obama is really doing here is not saying that he is a Muslim, but making a moral equivalence claim that all religions are equally capable of inciting their adherents to violence. That is a dogma that is nearly universally held these days, and is designed to stymie resistance to jihad and Islamic supremacism.
That dovetails well with Victor Davis Hanson’s take at NRO that contrary to how out of control his administration may seem, “Obama Does Have a Strategy:”
The Middle East is not a mess, but a place in a needed stage of transition as it frees itself from Western domination and a new order slowly emerges. To the degree that we need a large military, it is preferable to envision it as an executive agency for enacting social change without the clumsy impediment of Congress, especially in terms of race, women’s issues, and gender preferences. It can do the best work for stability abroad by shrinking itself. Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder and always a relative concept that Westerners pathologically insist is absolute. As far as the world abroad goes, China is a more authentic enterprise than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which are the products of U.S. Cold War nation-building in our own image, not of indigenous revolutionary self-creation. U.S. Cold War culpability — in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, South America, Cuba — is a burden that must be addressed through various means. The rules of nuclear proliferation are a Western construct. Israel is an abnormality, a Western outpost of capitalism and privilege where it has never really belonged, an irritant that should be treated like any other country as much as politically possible. Latin American grass-roots socialism is not Stalinism, but rather an extension of what Obama is trying to do at home.
I think the world now seems a chaotic place only if you assume that the Obama administration wished to be like its predecessors.
Roger L. Simon, our own Maximum Pajamahadeen Emeritus offers his take on the Commanding Troll in Chief’s hectoring speech: “A Jew Examines Why Obama Never Names Islam:”
Obama is not a religious person. He rarely appears in church, except for political purposes. He is titularly a Christian, but identifies emotionally, from his youth in Indonesian madrassas and from his ideological predisposition, with Third World Muslims. But now he is confronted with those same Muslims behaving like barbarians across Africa and the Middle East and sometimes into Europe and America.
What would be his reaction to that? Pretty much what it is for most throughout the Islamic world — shame. As many have noted, Islam is a shame culture (the kind of society that will go berserk over cartoons) and, like it or not, our president is part of it culturally. That does not mean he is stoning adulterers or cutting off the hands of thieves or treating women like chattel, but it does mean he is genuinely and quite deeply ashamed of the religion he, in part, came from. He cannot adjust to or accept the calamities it is causing. Unlike the president of Egypt, he cannot name it.
This also explains Obama’s determination to whitewash the behavior of Iran and make a deal with the Islamic Republic that will jeopardize the entire world. It also helps make more clear his ambivalent (at best) relationship to the state of Israel and its leaders.
It grieves me much to write this, because it is a horrible situation. Obama is not a Manchurian candidate and never was. He never had to be. He is just absolutely the wrong human being to be leading the West at this point in history. Heaven help us.
Whatever the source of Mr. Obama’s nihilistic radical chic worldview, those last two sentences are most assuredly true.
Related: Pretty much everything in Peter Hitchens’ 2000 book The Abolition of Britain is playing out in America 15 years later; is this a sneak preview of America in the coming years or decades?
I’ll bet Bernie Farber applauded: Guy who warned about Muslim rape gangs in 2004 was arrested for racism http://t.co/HaW5KGiDOT via @po_st
— Ed Driscoll (@EdDriscoll) February 6, 2015
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