President Obama seems to believe in nothing more than he does the defense of Islam. He specializes in pronouncements on what is truly Islamic and what is not. Such pronouncements are always intended to preserve the good name of Islam. Al Qaeda, of course, not Islamic. The Islamic State, not Islamic.
San Bernardino murderers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, not Islamic.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, well, they must be Islamic, but I don’t think anyone has bothered to ask him. Obama seeks to ally the United States with the Iranian regime, as he sought to ally the United States with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, they’re Islamic. Obama invited members of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary membership to attend his 2009 Cairo speech. Indeed, he gave them front row seats. They must be good Muslims by his lights.
What about Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot? Again, I don’t think anyone has asked him.
It’s a curious phenomenon. One is left to draw one’s own conclusions.
Today Obama makes his first visit to an American mosque. He plans to appear and speak at the mosque of the Islamic Center of Baltimore. It’s Islamic, but it raises the usual concerns of sane Americans such as Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the Islamic Forum for Democracy, reported by FOX News on Sunday: “As a Muslim American I’m just insulted, this is disgraceful that this is one of the mosques — or the mosque — that he’s chosen to visit.”
Investor’s Business Daily notes in a reported editorial:
President Obama is conferring legitimacy on a Baltimore mosque the FBI just a few years ago was monitoring as a breeding ground for terrorists, after arresting a member for plotting to blow up a federal building.IBD has learned that the FBI had been conducting surveillance at the Islamic Society of Baltimore since at least 2010 when it collared one of its members for plotting to bomb an Army recruiting center not far from the mosque in Catonsville, Md.Agents secretly recorded a number of conversations with a 25-year-old Muslim convert — Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain — and other Muslims who worshipped there. According to the criminal complaint, Martinez said he knew “brothers” who could supply him weapons and propane tanks.“He indicated that if the military continued to kill their Muslim brothers and sisters, they would need to expand their operation by killing U.S. Army personnel where they live,” FBI special agent Keith Bender wrote. Martinez said that in studying the Quran he learned that Islam counsels Muslims to “fight those who fight against you.”Sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2012, Martinez also stated in a social media posting that he wanted to join the ranks of the “mujahideen” in “Pakistan or Afghanistan (a country that struggle[sic] for the sake of allah).” Most of ISB’s board members are from Pakistan.To help disrupt the plot, the FBI reportedly put an undercover agent in the mosque, which upset the leadership there. After protests, the FBI sent an official to ISB to take questions and mollify concerns the bureau was spying on Muslims.Members of the mosque complained that the FBI tried to “entrap” Martinez and other Muslim terrorism suspects by sending “spies with Muslim names” into the mosque.“If I was the president of the mosque, I would not let you come here without strip(-searching) you,” one member angrily told the FBI official, “because you might drop something (like a bug) to hear what’s going on here.” “The Muslim Link” newspaper described the questioner as Pakistani.This is the mosque that will be honored with a visit from Obama on Wednesday, the first U.S. mosque visit of his presidency.It’s now abundantly clear the White House failed to properly vet the venue. Reportedly, it let the Council on American-Islamic Relations choose the site, even though the FBI has banned CAIR from outreach because of known ties to the Hamas terrorist group.“For a number of years we’ve been encouraging the president to go to an American mosque,” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. “With the tremendous rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in our country, we believe that it will send a message of inclusion and mutual respect.”As we reported Tuesday, ISB is affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America — which federal prosecutors in 2007 named a radical Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front and an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator in a scheme to funnel more than $12 million to Hamas suicide bombers — and ISB has helped organize the terror-tied ISNA’s conferences.The Shariah-compliant mosque was led for 15 years by a radical cleric — Imam Mohamad Adam el-Sheikh — who once represented a federally designated al-Qaida front group. El-Sheikh also has argued for the legitimacy of suicide bombings, according to the Washington Post.We also first reported that ISB board member and vice president Muhammad Jameel has blamed American foreign policy — namely, U.S. support for Israel — for terrorism and the rise of Osama bin Laden.
IBD has more, and then sums up: “So let’s recap. The mosque that is hosting the commander in chief, while receiving his historic benediction graduated a terrorist who plotted to blow up a local Army recruiting station, hired an imam who condoned suicide bombings and blames American ‘foreign policy’ for terrorism.”
As I say, one is left to draw one’s own conclusion. IBD draws this one, which errs on the side of generosity and caution: “Obama has to be willfully blind not to see all these ties to terror.”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/obama-defends-the-faith.php
Yesterday President Obama visited the mosque of the Islamic Society of Baltimore to give a speech defending Islam and Muslims against their unnamed opponents. The White House has posted the text of Obama’s speech. I have embedded the video below (actual time, about 45 minutes, feels like about 4 hours). Obama acknowledged the presence of Minnesota’s own Rep. Keith Ellison, formerly of the Nation of Islam, and of Indiana Rep. Andre Carson, Congress’s second Muslim convert.
In year 15 of America’s defense against terrorists inspired by Islam, Obama reiterated the full “religion of peace” shtick to which we have grown accustomed. Most of the speech partook of this mythical quality. Thus the supposed Muslim contributions to American history and to the United States, and thus the ritual reference to Thomas Jefferson’s Koran, which derived from our war with the barbarous pirates of Barbary. See, for example, Christopher Hitchens’s “Jefferson versus the Muslim pirates.”
Obama didn’t mention the Barbary pirates, of course. He therefore didn’t need to explain how they misunderstood Islam.
Obama decried the “inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim Americans.” I won’t hazard a guess on what Obama had in mind here, but I’m pretty sure he wants us all to shut up. If we would prefer not to celebrate Islam, Obama invites us to keep quiet or be stigmatized as bigots.
The mosque at which Obama appeared is itself illustrative of the problem of Islam in the United States. The editors of Investor’s Business Daily explored the mosque’s background in this reported editorial.
I believe the mosque is part of the network of mosques affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA is the Muslim Brotherhood’s umbrella organization in the United States. Obama’s appearance at the mosque was apparently cleared by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Both ISNA and CAIR were identified as unindicted co-conspirators of the Holy Land Foundation by the Department of Justice in the successful prosecution of the HLF for supporting Hamas. Funny, Obama didn’t mention any of that either.
When Obama gets around to “acknowledging” the connection of Islam to religiously inspired terrorism, he uses the acknowledgement to invite us to shut up:
Now, we do have another fact that we have to acknowledge. Even as the overwhelming majority — and I repeat, the overwhelming majority — of the world’s Muslims embrace Islam as a source of peace, it is undeniable that a small fraction of Muslims propagate a perverted interpretation of Islam. This is the truth.Groups like al Qaeda and ISIL, they’re not the first extremists in history to misuse God’s name. We’ve seen it before, across faiths. But right now, there is a organized extremist element that draws selectively from Islamic texts, twists them in an attempt to justify their killing and their terror. They combine it with false claims that America and the West are at war with Islam. And this warped thinking that has found adherents around the world — including, as we saw, tragically, in Boston and Chattanooga and San Bernardino — is real. It’s there. And it creates tensions and pressure that disproportionately burden the overwhelming majority of law-abiding Muslim citizens.* * * * *We shouldn’t play into terrorist propaganda. And we can’t suggest that Islam itself is at the root of the problem. That betrays our values. It alienates Muslim Americans. It’s hurtful to those kids who are trying to go to school and are members of the Boy Scouts, and are thinking about joining our military.That kind of mindset helps our enemies. It helps our enemies recruit. It makes us all less safe. So let’s be clear about that.
Many more points can and should be made about the this speech. I could go on, but my patience is limited. Obama should never have risen to high office in the government of the United States. He should have enlisted to represent the Organization of the Islamic Conference in its long-standing efforts to stigmatize concerns about Islam as “Islamophobia.” Unlike the cause of the United States, this is one cause that Obama believes in to the core of his being.
MORE PATIENT THAN I: David Harsanyi in “Obama’s mosque speech was a dangerous fantasy” (link fixed) and Roger Simon in “Obama’s Islamophobia.”
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