If you seek to understand Barack Obama and his views, the best place to go is his speeches. But you have to read them in their entirety, not rely on hearing them or on the medias summary of them. When you do, you realize how often what Obama says is morally and intellectually confused and even untrue.
The most recent example was his speech last week at a mosque in Baltimore. In addition to reassuring Muslim Americans, President Obama spoke a lot of nonsense, some of it dangerous.
President Obama: ”So let’s start with this fact: For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace. And the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam — peace.”
Why did Obama say this? Even Muslim websites acknowledge that Islam means submission [to Allah], that it comes from the Arabic root aslama meaning submission, and that Islam is in the command form of that verb.
That’s why Muslim means One who submits, not One who is peaceful.
Obama: ”Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran.”
The reason they had a copy of the Koran was to try to understand the Muslim ambassadors explanation that pirates from Tripoli were attacking American ships and enslaving Americans, because ”It was written in their Koran that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to Paradise.”
Obama: ”There are Christians who are targeted now in the Middle East, despite having been there for centuries, and there are Jews whove lived in places like France for centuries who now feel obliged to leave because they feel themselves under assault — sometimes by Muslims.”
Sometimes? French Jews have recently been murdered, tortured and harassed more than at any time since the Holocaust. And virtually every one of those attacks has been perpetrated by Muslims.
Obama: ”I often hear it said that we need moral clarity in this fight. And the suggestion is somehow that if I would simply say, these are all Islamic terrorists, then we would actually have solved the problem by now, apparently.”
The president has made extensive use of the straw man — a false target that he then attacks. No one has ever said that if the president were to identify Islamic terrorists by name instead of nameless violent extremists, then we would actually have solved the problem by now.
What drives most Americans crazy is that the president of the US refuses to name the enemy.
Obama: ”And, by the way, the notion that America is at war with Islam ignores the fact that the world’s religions are a part of who we are.”
Another straw man. No American of any stature has said that America is at war with Islam.
Obama: “In the discussion I had before I came out, some people said, why is there always a burden on us? When a young man in Charleston shoots African-Americans in a church, theres not an expectation that every white person in America suddenly is explaining that theyre not racist.”
This point alone should have been publicized by the media — that the president tells Muslims that they have no moral obligation to condemn violence committed in the name of Islam.
Obama: ”American Muslims are better positioned than anybody to show that it is possible to be faithful to Islam . . . and to believe in democracy.”
That is true. Given that theocracy, not democracy, is a central tenet of Islam, if an Islam compatible with democracy ever develops, it will probably develop in America.
Obama: ”These are the voices of Muslim scholars, some of whom join us today, who know Islam has a tradition of respect for other faiths.”
Another falsehood. Islam has no such tradition. Islam has always demanded that Jews and Christians be treated as humiliated second-class citizens when not forced to choose between conversion or death.
Now you know what President Obama said at the Islamic Society of Baltimore. But if you just read or listened to the mainstream media, you would have missed it because none of this was reported. It was all about, as the headline in USA Today put it, ”At Baltimore mosque, Obama condemns anti-Muslim bigotry.”
