Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama includedPosted on 06/11/2009 4:49:30 AM PDT by Tolik
Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama included
In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation.
This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World War II his great-uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Both are impossible. The Americans didn’t free either Nazi death camp. (Regarding Obama’s great uncle’s war experience, the Obama team later said he’d meant the camp at Buchenwald.)
Much of what Obama said to thousands of Germans during his Victory Column speech in Berlin last summer was also ahistorical. He began, “I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” He apparently forgot that for the prior eight years, the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany were Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — both African-Americans.
In the same speech, Obama seemed to suggest that the world had come to together to save Berlin during the Airlift. In fact, it was almost an entirely American and British effort — written off by most observers as hopeless and joined by a handful of Western allies only when the lift looked like it might succeed.
In the recent Cairo speech, Obama’s historical allusions were even more suspect. Almost every one of his references was either misleading or incomplete. He suggested that today’s Middle East tension was fed by the legacy of European colonialism and the Cold War that had reduced nations to proxies.
But the great colonizers of the Middle East were the Ottoman Muslims, who for centuries ruled with an iron fist. The 20th-century movements of Baathism, Pan-Arabism, and Nasserism — largely homegrown totalitarian ideologies — did far more damage over the last half-century to the Middle East than did the legacy of European colonialism.
Obama also claimed that “Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.” While medieval Islamic culture was impressive and ensured the survival of a few classical texts — often through the agency of Arabic-speaking Christians — it had little to do with the European rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin values. Europeans, Chinese, and Hindus, not Muslims, invented most of the breakthroughs Obama credited to Islamic innovation.
Much of the Renaissance, in fact, was more predicated on the centuries-long flight of Greek-speaking Byzantine scholars from Constantinople to Western Europe to escape the aggression of Islamic Turks. Many romantic thinkers of the Enlightenment sought to extend freedom to oppressed subjects of Muslim fundamentalist rule in eastern and southern Europe.
Obama also insisted that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” Yet the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478; by then Cordoba had long been re-conquered by Spanish Christians, and was governed as a staunchly Christian city.
In reference to Iraq, President Obama promised that “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” Is he unaware that the United States imposed democracies after World War II?
After the defeat of German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism, Americans — by force — insisted that these nations adopt democratic governments, for both their own sakes and the world’s. Indeed, it is hard to think of too many democratic governments that did not emerge from violence — including our own.
Obama also stated: “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.”
With all due respect to our president, this assertion is again not fully accurate. The only thing that ended slavery in the United States was the Civil War, which saw some 600,000 Americans — the vast majority of them white — lost in a violent struggle to ensure that nearly half the country would not remain a slave-owning society. Also, the massive urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly violent.
This list of distortions could be easily expanded. President Obama, in elegant fashion, may casually invoke the means of politically correct history for the higher ends of contemporary reconciliation. But it is a bad habit. Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama included.
Yes, that were the times of unpredictable past.
Welcome to surrealism.
I know, and Hussein could say the sky is yellow, purple or any color other than blue and 99% of the sheeple would believe him. I cannot believe the SRM is so negligent in their reporting.
He said:
And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson – kept in his personal library.
The question is why did he have one? Was it because he was respectful of Islam? No. He wanted to understand the basis of the barbarism of the pirates off the coast of Africa destroying American ships and enslaving their passengers. Obamarx's comment were dangerously incomplete.
Here is a little more detail: Link
Statue of Rip Van Winkle, Irvington, NY
O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'
'"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.
1984, George Orwell, Chapter 3
Flakes like him (and make no mistake - this clown is the king of the flakes) always gloss over the details. In fact, they hardly recognize that details exist much less important ones. I work with people like this. Someone tried to present a resume here for a position we had...a very important position, actually. This individual lied from beginning to end on everything in their resume. As if, no one would check. The individual ALMOST got hired till someone in HR (a person NOT razzle dazzled by the applicant) did their job and blew the whistle.
Unfortunately, no one looked very closely at Obama’s resume.
Then, he better go back to school, because he hasn't learned anything!!!
medieval Islamic culture was impressive
Islam stole much of it’s “culture” from the Sassanid Empire of Persia( Zoroastrians).
Arabs wandered out of the desert creating nothing but the Islam religion, forced their conquered to convert while claiming the vanquished Architecture, Arts and other sciences as their own.
Liberals never let the facts get in the way of THEIR Truth...
Obama’s Fantasy Islam
National Review Online ^ | June 11, 2009 | Alex Alexiev
It would also help if folks realized that no organization did more to end slavery than the Royal Navy. It was whites who stopped arabs from enslaving blacks.
Slavery was ended by Constitutional Amendment at the end of the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in those areas in rebellion against the United States. Slavery was legal in states that remained loyal to the Union, e.g Maryland, Kentucky.
In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation.
Barry is a “student of history” like I'm a Thoracic Surgeon. I'd lay odds he doesn't even know what happened in 1066 (and something pretty Historic happened then).
And as to him being an 'intellectual' .. 
... our 2yo Labrador Retriever has more intellect. The Kenyan is so dumb that if his Teleprompter read: "Mommy, I have to go make poopy now". He'd repeat it!
Einstein must of had Obama in mind when he came up with the quote I use for my Tagline!
A classical legacy many of the Obama supporters now reject in liberal universities as "Dead White Western males" and Eurocentrism. Ironic? The One seems an unlikely advocate of classical φρόνησις or The Nicomachean Ethics.
For sure! I’m going to college and some of those people defy belief. BTW, the most radical teachers and students that I’ve found are in the English Dept. After VA Tech shooting, they went around joking about people going “English” instead of “postal.” At least one of those was a professor.
Truth-telling [David Warren dissects Obama's approach to truth in the Cairo and D-Day speeches]
davidwarrenonline.com ^ | June 10, 2009 | David Warren
He sure has been on fire...his commentaries are sharp and right on the money, and directed squarely at Zero.
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