Posted on 06/30/2009 1:28:50 PM PDT by AJKauf
President Barack Obama’s famous (or infamous) Cairo address of June 4, 2009, has been subjected to the unrelenting scrutiny of many reputable observers and distinguished political scholars — and found egregiously wanting. It is replete with distortions, fabrications, lacunae, misconceptions, inaccuracies, lies, exaggerations, and outright historical fallacies. There is scarcely a passage without its resident howler. I do not have the space to run through this near-interminable list here — anyone with a decent knowledge of history or ready access to a search engine can trawl for himself — but I will provide two exemplary instances of historical error.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, Obama’s allusion to Islam’s “proud history of tolerance” which can be seen “in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition” is a blooper of major scale. Islam flourished in Cordoba chiefly during the tenth century; the Inquisition began to wreak its havoc toward the end of the fifteenth. If the president can drop five centuries from the historical calendar without skipping a beat, one is surely entitled to suspect the pondered validity of many of his other calculations....
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
“Obama’s allusion to Islam’s ‘proud history of tolerance’ which can be seen ‘in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition’”
Also irking about this statement is the implication that somehow Christianity is less tolerant than Islam, or at least was during the Inquisition. As if Muslims have nothing that can compare.
Another example of obozo the clown not really an American. He’s a foreigner and subject to foreign influences.
Word of the day: Lacunae
A missing part, gap, or empty space.
Just another slip of paper into the memory hole.
..sorta like his Presidency
The above statement from Obama's speech is almost an exact quote from the Spaceship Earth ride in Walt Disney World's Epcot.
I had to look it up too. Live and learn I reckon.
Example: “Osteocytes occupy a *lacuna* in bone tissue.”
Or, “There is a *lacuna* in the place of the Constitution in the mind of the modern liberal.”
As with everything, there’s a measure of truth there. Western civilization (of which Islam is technically a part, given that it is descended from Judiasm, just like Christianity) benefitted from Arab learning, in architecture, navigation, algebra, chemistry, geography, and philosophy (I kinda like Al-Farabi).
However, we deserve credit for our Renaissance and Enlightenment. Gain from Arab culture though we did, if their ideas were fundamentally important, why didn’t they have an Enlightenment? Huh? We all know why; because their religion inhibited them.
Oh I did too.
My mother made a sport of making me looks things up as a kid.
It turned into a good habit (thanks, ma). Now, whenever I read something I still look up words I don’t know, almost daily in fact. I even keep a college paperback dictionary in the nightstand drawer.
When I see something posted here with an obscure word I will often post it back as a ‘word of the day’ just for fun. I figure maybe some will think I’m an idiot for having to look it up, but some others may appreciate me saving them a few seconds of search time.
Even wiping out the conflation of Andalusia & Cordoba with the Spanish Inquisition [different from Holy Inquisition controlled by Roman Papacy], Obama's speech disregards significant pogroms against the Jews by their Islamic Overlords, significant tax burdens and even religiously identifiable clothing (burdens also shared by minority Christians in these Islamic-controlled areas).
Thus these periods of 'tolerance' in times of Islamic rule throughout history may be rightfully regarded as ABERRATIONS in the NORMAL behavior of Islamic Theocracies. The 'People of the Book' (mainly Jews and Christians) were treated BETTER than PAGANS but far below the average Muslim.
A rough similarity might be differing treatment allocated to American Indians, persons of African ancestry and persons of Asian ancestry by persons of Western European ancestry. Better treatment of one group does NOT MEAN good treatment. Who would have thunk it!
Islam is not part of Western Civ. Western Civ starts with the individualism of the Greeks, which was strongly rejected by Islam. There’s more to the argument, but one point should be enough. Reject the Greek tradition, and you reject Western Civ.
I think it's not so much aberration, as a temporary phase. After having captured an area, the Muslims are too few to be very oppressive. That could provoke insurrections. So, they let folks do what they were doing, and get rich on the taxes. As the muslim percentage of the population grows, eventually taxes and oppression rise on the non-muslim groups. By then, the non-muslim groups have lost the capability to do anything about it and the muslims can clamp down with impunity. That fact that this clamping down tends to impoverish everybody doesn't seem to bother the muslim rulers.
It's in the first tolerant years of Muslim rule that you see intellectual advances claimed as part of the Muslim tradition. But mostly the advances are made by the non-muslims who haven't yet been converted to Islam or to poverty.
“Western Civ starts with the individualism of the Greeks, which was strongly rejected by Islam”
Starting Western civilization with the Greeks instead of the Jews, who came first, is a big mistake. Historians partially credit a “return to the ancients” for the intellectual revolution following the 15th century. As far as science goes, they have a point. But are you gonna tell me Erasmus, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Hume, Kant, etc., were more familiar with Aristotle and Plato than the Bible? I doubt it.
Also, the individualist aspects of Greek culture are highly overrated, in my opinion.
Not that I want to downplay individualism. It is a prerequisite for a free and prosperous society. I happen to think civilization must rest on sturdier ground, which comes from the system of traditional morality passed down through the generations. The Western moral system derives largely from Christianity. You know, “do unto others...” etc.
The 'do unto others...' bit doesn't play against individualism. It's an individual responsibility to play by that rule. I want others to let me be free, so I let them be free. The current use of that rule seems to be "do onto others the way I want you do onto me", as in give me free medical service.
The Kantian form of morality, as in subservience to the other in a manner prescribed by yet others (i.e. the State), is not in the line of Wester Civ, but a non-rational reaction to the traditions of individualism in Western Civ. That's the Randian analysis, and right now I find it compelling. Maybe you have an alternate analysis of Kant to share.
I didn’t mean to, and did not, exclude the impact of Judaism on Western Civ. But without the Greeks, Judaism is a variety of the Oriental Civ (original meaning of Orient, not Chinese but Middle Eastern). The point is that Western Civilization emphasizes individualism, and Islam does not. Neither does the Judaism that uses scapegoats.
“The Kantian form of morality, as in subservience to the other in a manner prescribed by yet others (i.e. the State), is not in the line of Wester Civ, but a non-rational reaction to the traditions of individualism in Western Civ. That’s the Randian analysis, and right now I find it compelling”
Rand, I find, has a knee-jerk reaction to people who take epistemological questions seriously. Especially since that particular subgenre of philosophy ended up being, in retrospect—that is, after Hegel, Marx, James, Freud, Berson, Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, Satre, existentialism in general, and especially Heidegger—the origin of the rootless and confused nature of the modern mind. It’s all well and good to yearn for Aristotelean simplicity, but epistemology really is a problem. To be an honest philosopher in the 20th century you can ignore irrationalists like Heidegger, but you cannot ignore Hume.
Kant answered Hume. Or rather, he answered radical empiricism. That is his legacy. Insofar as he criticised “pure reason,” he did so in order to make it stronger, strong enough to withstand skepticism. His philosophy was not a rejection of rationality, rather a justification thereof.
Existentialists or postmodernists can say he was facile, and Rand can say he was hypercritical. However, to allege he was an irrational reactionary (radical would be a better word, actually) against the Western tradition is unfair. Unfair and innaccurate. Give that credit to Rousseau or Nietzsche.
As for his moral system, it is most emphatically not “subservience to the other in a manner prescribed by yet others...” We need not go into too much detail. Even the bumper-sticker version of Kantian morality knows that one of his main points is that no one may be used as a means to another’s ends: that every man is an end unto himself.
In short, here’s his formulation. Our wills are not perfectly free. In order to be free, something has to operate in within the context of certain laws, otherwise it would be arbitrary. The law he has in mind is known as the “categorical imperative,” which can be stated as, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
The “universal law” of human action is based on the fact that all rational action is autonomous, and you cannot deny seperate and equal status to any rational being. Therefore, each man has a duty to treat themselves and others not as a means to an end (like the slavemaster) but as an end unto themselves.
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