Obama has turned America into Islam’s universal enforcer

As I’ve said before, Obama keeps throwing so many things at us at once, and so many unprecedented and radical and appalling things, that it’s not possible to catch even a fraction of them immediately and understand their significance. Thus over the last few days, I’ve kept noticing new things about his Cairo speech, but missing others, and then noticing them too, often due to readers’ bringing them out. This morning Howard Sutherland sent an e-mail which began:

“I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

That is how B. Hussein Obama describes the role of the President of the United States with respect to Islam. It is an astonishing statement, and the most revealing thing Obama said in a speech unprecedented for an American president….

Two days ago, in “The first caliph of the West?”, we discussed the significance of Obama’s amazing statement that it’s his responsibility to fight negative stereotypes of Islam. But I had not zeroed in on the phrase, “wherever they appear.” As soon as I did so just now, I was reminded of George W. Bush’s 2005 Inaugural:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands…. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government…. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time…. It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world.

Thus for Bush, any tyranny anywhere, any lack of liberty anywhere, is an immediate threat to our nation’s liberty and security, and therefore it becomes the President’s urgent constitutional responsibility to end tyranny everywhere.

Obama, like Bush, also claims a universal mandate, except that Obama’s universal mandate is not to end tyranny everywhere, so as to protect American liberty and security; Obama’s mandate is to end negative stereotypes of Islam everywhere, so as to protect Islam.

In my 2007 article, “The Hyper-Bushians,” I pointed out how Mark Steyn and other neocons fully endorsed Bush’s message of forcefully pushing democracy everywhere:

[W]hat I’ve described as the Hyper-Bushian position—democratization, plus real action backing it up—remains the neoconservatives’ fundamental ideological and rhetorical stance…. Given their basic suppositions about the world, the neocons have no choice but to be Hyper-Bushians. As Steyn writes in his book, there are only three possible Western responses to Islam: to submit to it, to destroy it, or to reform it; and since the first two are out of the question, that leaves only the third, reform; and since our very survival depends on Islam being reformed, we cannot leave the reform up to the Muslims, but must take steps ourselves to assure that it takes place.

Of course, Steyn and other neocons never even mention a fourth possible Western response to Islam: to isolate, weaken, and contain it, as the West successfully did from the 17th to the 20th centuries, and as I urge today under the rubric of Separationism. The neocons cannot list Separationism even as a logical alternative to reform, because that would mean admitting that the vision of a single humanity living under a single democratic order is not the only possible path for mankind.

So, because the Bushians rejected Separationism out of hand, and since they also didn’t want to surrender to Islam, that left them with only one policy option: intrusive universal democratization, or Hyper-Bushianism. But there’s a further corollary to this. If you reject Separationism, and if you also reject Hyper-Bushianism (as Obama, of course, does), that leaves you with only one policy option: accommodation and surrender to Islam. By defining the responsibility of the President of the United States as “fighting against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear,” which means nothing less than punishing and silencing truthful criticism of Islam, wherever it appears, Obama has defined the United States of America as an agent of the Islamic agenda to Islamize the world.

Here is Howard Sutherland’s e-mail.

“I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

That is how B. Hussein Obama describes the role of the President of the United States with respect to Islam. It is an astonishing statement, and the most revealing thing Obama said in a speech unprecedented for an American president. (That last is something of a misnomer; Obama may hold the office of president, but I’m not sure he’s altogether an American, so maybe “American president” isn’t quite right.) Doesn’t anyone remember that less than eight years ago, 19 Moslems, all from two of the Middle Eastern countries Obama visited (three from right where he was speaking), murdered over 3,000 people in America in the name of Islam?

Out of curiosity, I blew the dust off of my old copy of that under-used document, the Constitution of the United States. I wanted to see if its description of the president’s duties in any way corresponds to what Obama told his Moslem brethren. I looked high and low, and I just couldn’t find anything in it about fighting negative stereotypes of Islam everywhere in the world they might be imagined to appear. In fact, I didn’t even see anything about fighting against negative stereotypes of Christianity, and I have a vague recollection from before American education was corrected that America was a pretty Christian confederation of states when the federal Constitution was drafted and ratified. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, though, because I also couldn’t find anything about empathy’s being a criterion for appointing federal judges, and The One informs us that it is all-important.

Seriously, we Americans are in an unprecedented situation. We have had bad presidents before, plenty of them. I would say every one since Reagan has been toward the bad end of the spectrum, as were Reagan’s four predecessors. Even Reagan wasn’t a complete prize (he gave into the GOP establishment and foisted the Bushes on us, and also gave in over an illegal alien amnesty). But at least they were Americans. We now have as president an unprecedentedly—forgive my overuse of the term, but it applies—unqualified and inexperienced cipher who is in very significant ways alien to America. What Obama’s ritual abasement of our country before his Moslem audience in Cairo confirms is that this man, whoever he really is, is more in sympathy with the Moslems of the Middle East than with the Americans (palefaces, anyway) of the United States.

The revised job description Obama stated in Cairo is a betrayal of his oath of office, not a fulfillment of it. How is defending the reputation of Islam, a religious and political system entirely at odds with Western traditions of parliamentary democracy, in any way consistent with preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States, as the presidential oath requires? Maybe that’s why Obama had so much trouble reciting the oath of office.

Ray is right. Our government is now not merely hostile to ordinary Americans, as it has been for years, it is now effectively a foreign government. If it had the stomach for it, that uncomfortable realization is something Republicans could exploit as they struggle to recover from the disasters of their Bush/Rove/McCain years. But somehow I doubt they will. Defaulting to their stupid mode, they’ll probably figure the way to challenge the increasing alien-ness of the Democrats is to go alien themselves, so expect a lot of ballyhoo about Jindal and the Vietnamese congressman they’re so excited about.

I’m still wondering what will be Americans’ wake-up call about their own dispossession, or if—at this late date—we are capable of hearing one. 9/11 wasn’t it, and those were pretty loud booms.

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Mark A. writes:

Ahh…but if liberalism ruins our society (and the ruin is almost complete), who will do the “enforcing?” My friends in the military tell me *all* of the good people have left, are leaving, or are planning to leave. I have heard it is becoming infested with gang bangers, welfare moms, and street trash. A friend in the Navy told me the minute you turn your head from your possessions on a Navy ship, whatever is valuable and unlocked will be stolen by your fellow “heroes.” Good luck, defending Islam, Mr. Obama. You will need it

LA replies:

Good point. When I say that Obama has turned America into Islam’s enforcer, I mean that is his policy, not that he will be able to carry it out, just as spreading democracy was Bush’s policy, but, other than in the two countries we occupied and nursed, he was not able to carry it out. But the attempt to carry it out can be damaging enough.

Paul T. writes:

Alternative interpretation of “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

“Wherever” doesn’t necessarily mean ‘anywhere in the world’; it could just as well mean ‘in every context [in American life]’—in government, the military, the media, education, the private sector, etc., etc. This seems more likely to me—how could he, for example, commit to fighting negative stereotypes of Islam in France or Chile?

LA replies:

Yes, you may be right. Except, if any non-Muslim country sought to defend itself from Islam, Obama is clearly telling us that he would side with the Muslims and against that country.

Of course it could be nothing but oratory. But oratory coming from the president of the United States matters.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 08, 2009 12:00 PM | Send