Spencer: Obama's Ramadan Delusions

At FrontPage this morning I dissect Obama's message to Muslims on the beginning of Ramadan:

This year's Ramadan message from Barack Obama is the latest in a long line of warmly complimentary communications that he has addressed to the Islamic world over the last eighteen months. Reciprocally warm and friendly greetings have yet to arrive from those to whom Obama has addressed these messages, but the President appears undaunted. Eighteen months into his presidency, he seems to be clinging more determinedly than ever to the idea that soft words about Islam will turn away the jihad - despite the total lack of confirming evidence. Just as he did in his June 2009 address to the Islamic world in Cairo, where he used the greeting by which one Muslim is to greet another, as-salaamu aleikum (peace be upon you), Obama in his Ramadan message adopted Islamic terminology. "Ramadan Kareem," he said near the beginning of the message, and ended it with "may God's peace be upon you." Clearly he is doing his best to give the impression that he comes in friendship. And he doesn't stop there.

Again characteristically, Obama then retails a few platitudes lifted straight out of a ninth-grade World Religions textbook: "Ramadan is a time when Muslims around the world reflect upon the wisdom and guidance that comes with faith, and the responsibility that human beings have to one another, and to God. This is a time when families gather, friends host iftars, and meals are shared. But Ramadan is also a time of intense devotion and reflection - a time when Muslims fast during the day and pray during the night; when Muslims provide support to others to advance opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere."

One may legitimately wonder how past Ramadans have resulted in any advancement of "opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere." In reality, it contravenes Islamic law to give zakat, the almsgiving that is one of the pillars of Islam and is required of every Muslim, to non-Muslims. That's why it is easy to find Western governmental agencies and Christian charitable organizations busy building and staffing schools and hospitals in impoverished parts of Africa and Asia, but oil-rich Muslim countries have never undertaken similar endeavors. With the sharp divide in Islam between believers and unbelievers, such that Muslims are commanded to be "merciful to one another, but ruthless to the unbelievers" (Qur'an 48:29), there simply is no basis in Islamic law for the idea that Islam fosters the advance of "opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere."

Heedless, however, of the inaccuracy of his words, Obama charged ahead and compounded it. Ramadan's rituals of fasting and prayer, he said, "remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam's role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings."

Here again, one wonders how the designation of non-Muslims as "the most vile of created beings" (Qur'an 98:6) advances human dignity, much less tolerance or justice. The command that Muslims must fight against Jews and Christians until they pay a religion-based poll tax, jizya, "with willing submission and feel themselves subdued" (Qur'an 9:29) likewise seems to militate against the idea of universal human dignity that Obama professes to have discovered in Islam.

Yet still his flights of fancy weren't over. "Ramadan," he claimed, "is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality." Diversity? While it is undoubtedly true that people of all races and nations have embraced Islam, when they do so, they at least partially Arabize. Islam is an Arabic religion; the Qur'an, as it tells us about itself repeatedly, is an "Arabic Qur'an." Muslims must pray in Arabic, and recite the Qur'an in Arabic, whether they're weathermen from Minnesota or fishermen from Indonesia. Conversion to Islam led a black American to change his name to Muhammad Ali, a name he undoubtedly shares with innumerable Arabs, Pakistanis, Afghans, and others. A recent meeting of Southeast Asian dignitaries showed participants with names indigenous to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the other countries in the region. Only the Indonesian participant had a name that had nothing to do with the indigenous culture of the country of his birth, and everything to do with Arabia. What's more, throughout Islamic history Arabs have claimed for themselves a privileged position within the Islamic community, and have regarded non-Arab Muslims as second-class. Racial equality? Not by a long shot.

"And here in the United States," Obama continued, "Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country." Islam has always been a part of America? Really? Maybe Robert Gibbs will be so kind as to provide us with a list of the Muslim Founding Fathers, the Muslim heroes of the American Revolution, the names of the Muslims killed fighting in the Civil War (for the North, no doubt - you know, "racial equality"!), the Muslim Senators and Congressmen who served with distinction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - I'm sure the Obama Administration will have no trouble coming up with all that, will they? And I trust it will also contain a list of those "extraordinary contributions" that Muslims have made to our country. Aside from being the impetus for some extraordinary innovations in airport security, I can't think of any.

Found this on another post.

When the Founding Fathers Faced Islamists
“Back in 1784, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had to decide whether to appease or stand up to armed Middle Eastern pirates. Sound familiar?

.... The Middle East, a term coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of McCain’s boyhood idols, is where both American warfare and American diplomacy began in the late 18th century, as our infant republic faced its first post-Revolutionary struggle against the evocatively named Barbary States of the Ottoman Empire.

The regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers (future homes of Muammar Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and the Islamic Salvation Front, respectively) had been hosting and sponsoring Islamic piracy since the Middle Ages. Scimitar-wielding corsairs would regularly interrupt the flow of trade and traffic along the coasts of North Africa, seizing European vessels and taking their crews into bondage. Cervantes wrote his first play, in the 16th century, about the dread corsairs, and by the 18th, the American colonies had a minor seagoing presence in the Mediterranean protected by the redoubtable British Navy. But the Crown was reluctant to war against so petty an antagonist, preferring to pay “tribute” to the Barbary States instead, as a shopkeeper would protection money to the mafia. After the U.S. broke away from England and became its own nation, however, the geopolitical dynamics changed, as did the American equanimity with doing business with pirates.

In 1784, corsairs attacked the Betsy, a 300-ton brig that had sailed from Boston to Tenerife Island, about 100 miles off the North African coast, selling her new-made citizens as chattel on the markets of Morocco. The U.S. was not free of its own moral taint of slavery, of course, but it would be impossible to hasten the industrial development that would eventually render the agrarian-plantation economy obsolete if merchant ships could not be assured of safe conduct near the Turkish Porte. Other vessels, such as the Dauphin and Maria, were also seized, this time by Algiers, and the horrifying experiences of their captive passengers relayed back home were the cause for outrage. James Leander Cathcart described the dungeon in which he was being kept as “perfectly dark…where the slaves sleep four tiers deep…many nearly naked, and few with anything more than an old tattered blanket to cover them in the depth of winter.”

In response, Thomas Jefferson, then the Minister to France, suggested a multilateral approach of what we would now term “deterrence.” He asked that Spain, Portugal, Naples, Denmark, Sweden and France enter into a coalition with America to dissuade the regencies from their criminal assaults on life, liberty and the pursuit of international commerce. As Michael Oren, in his magisterial history Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to Present relates, “By deterring, rather than appeasing, Barbary, the United States would preserve its economy and send an unambiguous message to potentially hostile powers.” Jefferson thought it would impress Europe if America could do what Europe had failed to do for centuries and beat back the persistent thuggery of Islamists. “It will procure us respect,” said the author of the Declaration of Independence. “And respect is a safeguard to interest.”

This sober judgment fused the cold calculations of latter-day “realism” with the morality behind revolutionary interventionism: not only would America protect its citizens from plunder and foreign slaveholding; it would ensure that other countries under “Christendom” were similarly protected.

Though Jefferson found a stalwart Continental ally in a former one, the Marquis de Lafayette, France squelched the idea of a NATO made of buckshot and cannon. While waiting for funds that would never come from Congress for the construction of a 150-gun navy, the sage of Monticello resigned himself to further diplomacy with the enemy. In 1785, he dispatched John Lamb, a Connecticut businessman, to secure the release of hostages in Algiers, held by its dynastic sovereign Hassan Dey. Lamb failed ignominiously.

At the same time, John Adams, then minister to England, agreed to receive the pasha of Tripoli, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar, in his London quarters to discuss a possible peace deal. Adams described his interlocutor as a man who looked all “pestilence and war,” a suspicion that was soon confirmed by the pasha’s demand of 30,000 guineas for his statelet, plus a 3,000 guinea gratuity for himself. He also did Adams the favor of estimating what it would cost the U.S. to broker a similar deal with Tunis, Morocco and Algiers — the total price for blackmail would be about $1 million, or a tenth the annual budget of the United States.

Adams was incensed. “It would be more proper to write [of his meeting with ‘Abd al-Rahman] for the… New York Theatre,” he thundered. He agreed with Jefferson that a military response was increasingly likely, but Adams doubted his country’s economic ability to sustain it. For the short term, he thought it better to offer “one Gift of two hundred Thousand Pounds” rather than forfeit “a Million annually” in trade revenue, which the pirates were sure to disrupt. Not long thereafter, Jefferson joined him in London to prevent the “universal and horrible War” and reach an accord with the refractory envoy from Tripoli. Both gentlemen of the Enlightenment, and comrades in revolution, affirmed America’s desire for peace, its respect for all nations, and suggested a treaty of lasting friendship with the regency. ‘Abd al-Rahman listened well, but his reply was one that would shock modern ears less than it did those of the two Founding Fathers:

“It was… written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon wheoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Though a period of paying tribute and douceurs (or “softeners” — expensive trickets and toys) to Islamic pirates would continue, the words of ‘Abd al-Rahman Adams were chilling enough to leave Adams and Jefferson in no doubt as to the sanguinary and messianic nature of their adversary. “An angel sent on this business,” lamented Jefferson, “could have done nothing” to placate such men. He called them “sea dogs” and a “pettifogging nest of robbers.” The episode preceded further acts of piracy against American vessels and the imprisonment and sale of its crews and passengers, and was enough to get Jefferson to overlook his wariness of federalism and agree to a Constitution with a strong central government capable of building and keeping a powerful navy. Adams, as it turned out, was more worried that American opinion wouldn’t rally for war, or accept its dire consequences. But the Philadelphia convention that drafted our national covenant in 1787 was hastened, and its welter of opinions unified, by the Barbary question. As the historian Thomas Bailey wrote, “In an indirect sense, the brutal Dey of Algiers was a Founding Father of the Constitution.”

Barbary Pirates torture western prisoners

America still sued for peace. The Betsy’s release had been negotiated, albeit abjectly, and to the accompaniment of America’s first diplomatic accord, the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Ship-Signals, signed with Morocco in 1786. But no sooner was the ship let go and its captives freed than it was recaptured by Tunis and renamed the Mashuda. Also, Washington at one point found itself spending 20% of its annual revenue in paying blackmail to a loose confederation of terrorists on the high seas. Under Jefferson’s presidency, the first era of American military predominance was inaugurated, with men like William Bainbridge, William Eaton and the Byronic swashbuckler Stephen Decatur, becoming folk heroes.

....Santayana got it backwards, in fact: even those who remember history are still doomed to repeat it.”

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