President Obama couldn't bring himself to observe the National Day of Prayer or spend time with the Boy Scouts of America, but God forbid, he couldn't miss the Muslim Iftar Ramadan dinner, or pass up a chance to praise an Islamic center a stone's throw away from Ground Zero.
He later backed down -- a bit.
One has to wonder exactly who is this Barack Obama? Is he the Muslim-educated student who has repeatedly proclaimed his Christian beliefs while finding himself unable to put a foot in a Christian church in Washington he can call his own, or is he an adult still motivated by the Muslim faith he learned and practiced as a young man?
This is a serious question, especially since Obama has gone out of his way to befriend a community, many of whom bear a deep hatred for the United States and a fanatical belief in the inevitability of supremacy of Islam over the United States.
Daniel Pipes writes that the Muslim population in this "country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people who desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam."
He cites the case of Siraj Wahaj, a black convert to Islam and the recipient of some of the American Muslim community's highest honors, who in June 1991 had the privilege of becoming the first Muslim to deliver the daily prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A little over a year later, addressing an audience of New Jersey Muslims, the same Wahaj said that "if only Muslims were more clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.
Said Wahaj: "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us."
This is "the religion of peace"?
Writing in the August 5 Washington Times, Jeffery T. Kuhner warns that the decision to build a 13-story mosque and Muslim cultural center 600 feet from the site of Ground Zero represents the surrender of the United States to radical Islam. He insists that most New Yorkers and Americans do not want this mosque erected and warns that it will be "a symbolic monument to the triumph of Islamism in the Unites States."
Kuhner notes that the attacks on 9/11 were "committed by Muslim extremists in the name of holy war against the West. [using] the Koran and Islamic principles to justify their actions." Their ultimate goal, he warns, is "to impose a world Muslim empire based on Shariah law."
"Ground Zero," he explains, "is where the war came home to America," and supporters of the mosque project push forward to make sure "the mosque will cast a giant, dark shadow over Ground Zero," a constant reminder of Islam's victory. "If Islamism can impose its will near the site of Sept. 11, then it can impose its will anywhere."
Unfortunately, it appears that Islam is also imposing its will and casting a shadow over the Obama White House.
JONAH GOLDBERG Lack of Foresight Lets Mosque Controversy Balloon This whole debate could have been avoided with a few phone calls. The Ground Zero mosque controversy is one of the stupidest debates of our time. I don’t mean the substance of the debate (though there’s no shortage of stupidity on that front either). I mean that we are having it at all. The CIA usually defends its existence by pointing out that we never hear about its successes, only its failures. The bombs that don’t go off don’t make headlines. Politics works the same way. Good politicians instinctively see down the road and around the corner. Great politicians do this not just with political headaches but with weighty affairs as well. We call such foresight statesmanship. With the Ground Zero mosque, we have gotten the exact opposite. The supposedly pragmatic political wise men have been blinded by ideology or incompetence and have failed to see what was so obviously around the corner. A big, honking Islamic center built to capitalize on 9/11, in a building that was damaged on 9/11? What could go wrong? It’s as if they’ve wanted to turn a dumb idea into an emotional and unwinnable national controversy. Let’s start with the incandescent idiocy of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. If Bloomberg had a scintilla of foresight, he would have prevented anyone from ever hearing the words “Ground Zero” and “mosque” in the same sentence. Bloomberg is not only the mayor. He’s also a billionaire with massive sway in the city’s media, finance, and cultural institutions. Moreover, the Big Apple is a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape for landlords and developers. Rent control, historic preservation, zoning, environmental impact, community protests, union delays — not to mention plain old red tape and corruption — offer enough tools to stop any project before it starts. (Heck, Ground Zero is still a gaping hole, and everyone has wanted that land to be developed, fast.) The notion that Bloomberg couldn’t have quietly stopped this in New York is like saying Satan is powerless to do anything about the heat in Hades. He could have kept the molehill from becoming a mountain with an afternoon’s worth of phone calls. The center would be built, just not so close to Ground Zero; no big deal. But instead of quietly extinguishing a controversy, Bloomberg said it was as important a “test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime.” He also insists that opponents should be “ashamed” of their bigotry, even though he expects “special sensitivity” from the mosque’s backers. Apparently, it’s only shameful to think Ground Zero requires “special sensitivity” if you oppose the mosque. Bloomberg apparently needs a tutor to pass his own church-state test. Which brings us to President Obama (who himself could have quietly intervened months ago) and to what may be his most embarrassing blunder yet. At a White House dinner with Muslim leaders Friday night, Obama offered what every major journalistic outfit in the country took to be unqualified support for building the mosque. Indeed, Obama aides preened over his moral courage, telling the New York Times that there was no doubt which side he would take. “He felt he had a responsibility to speak,” said David Axelrod, as if he were drafting the inscription on Obama’s Profiles in Courage Award. But by Saturday morning, Obama tried to weasel out of it with the sort of lawyerly parsing everybody despises. Speaking to reporters in Florida, Obama claimed he had no position on the “wisdom” of the project, and anyone who mistook his academic comments about building a mosque in Lower Manhattan for an endorsement misunderstood him. Well, if his real intent was to remain agnostic, he should fire his speechwriter immediately. |
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