Reality TV: Obama at the Mosque - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Reality TV: Obama at the Mosque
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“Thou doth protest too much.” That’s my reaction to President Barack Obama’s visit to a mosque yesterday.

There is no national attack on Muslims that requires Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and major Democrats in Congress and in state legislatures, and Democrat governors and mayors, universities, mainstream media, to dignify a problem that doesn’t exist. They are projecting Obama’s enthusiasm for Islam.

Let’s stop demonizing Donald Trump as an excuse to accelerate the Islamization of America. Trump deserves credit for his blunt denunciation of political correctness, where a San Bernardino County resident did not report suspicious activity among the terrorists because of Obama’s chilling environment of political correctness. 

Nearly a decade ago, a high-ranking German military officer predicted to me there would be more Muslims coming into Germany because, he said, Germans felt guilt and remorse about the Holocaust, so the government would go overboard with Muslims to show religious tolerance. Now Angela Merkel is trying to save face, so she won’t repudiate her misguided policy of mass importation of Muslims, but she must privately regret the disruption of Germany. The ultimate hypocrisy of the so-called women’s movement (in Germany and here) is its refusal to confront, for example, the attacks on women in Cologne, indicating that in Germany and (sadly) here in the U.S. multiculturalism takes precedence over women’s rights.

Why don’t we have a president who says that today’s Muslim immigrants are not the same as past Muslim immigrants, instead of his inaccurate portrayal of Muslim immigration as benign or beneficial? Many Muslims came here — and to Europe — a generation or two ago for a better life, not for welfare. Many who came to the U.S. were pro-American, not anti-American. They knew they wanted to assimilate, and they did assimilate. Many were educated and skilled and family oriented and came here to work hard. The immigrant demographics are different today. In Michigan, for example, welfare forms are also printed in Arabic.

Just like Obama wants to make African Americans or women or homosexuals or Native Americans or Latinos into victims, his strategy of division is to make Muslims into victims. Newborn Muslim immigrants are treated more favorably than needy Americans — white, African-American or others — who have been left impoverished by the failed Obama economic policies.

Already Muslims are a privileged group. Just as the Obama administration interprets freedom of religion selectively as it wants to force a Christian baker who finds a gay wedding immoral to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding, or a Christian florist to provide the wedding flowers, the same Obama lawyers favor Muslims. The government seems to believe that a Muslim truck driver must be “accommodated” if he doesn’t want to transport alcohol, or a Muslim airline steward must be “accommodated” if he doesn’t want to serve alcohol. Abercrombie and Fitch, a clothing chain that was selling clothes via sexual appeal, was told it had to hire a Muslim who didn’t fit the A-F image. If you can’t do the job, don’t apply.

Now Muslim employees at a factory are suing to get five breaks for prayer. This is not a Muslim country. If Muslim immigrants want to be called to prayer five times a day, perhaps they would be happier in a Muslim country. America used to be a country where the main religion, though not an official state religion, was Christianity. As a Jew, I appreciated our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage, and I never felt threatened that the overwhelming share of the population here was Christian. Often at public functions a Protestant, Catholic or Jew made a prayer, all three at past presidential swearing-ins. Will we add a Muslim? A Buddhist? A Scientologist? A humanist? How many other religions or movements for political correctness? Now, the Christmas season is a farce, and it’s politically incorrect to say Merry Christmas.

Can’t these Muslims pray in the morning coffee break, lunchtime, and the afternoon break, and pray at home in the morning and in the evening? Or if that doesn’t work for the five prayers perhaps they should find a different job. I respect that praying five times is part of their religion; but as an employer, I don’t have to “accommodate” it; and as a consumer, I don’t want to, however indirectly, pay for it. My orthodox Jewish grandparents prayed three times a day, but not on their employer’s time. And they did not work on Saturday. If that didn’t mesh with their job, they found another job. All this was not the employer’s concern or problem. My Jewish immigrant ancestors did not want to impose their religious faith on others, and certainly not through government. Indeed, when I went to Jewish services, there was an explicit prayer for our government, for the United States.

We know what it’s like in Muslim nations. There are no “accommodations” there for Christians or Jews. There are no Jews there, and now the few Christians there are being driven out. Instead of backing Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s legislation to prioritize asylum for persecuted Christians feeling Muslim persecution, President Obama’s priority is mass Muslim migration into the United States. Obama relies for refugee flow on the United Nations camps that discriminate against Christians. 

Our Founders did not want the kind of society where the government imposes a state religion. They did not want the government to interfere in the free exercise of religion. They never envisioned government telling employers who to hire or fire, in general, especially relating to any sort of religious practice, or how to go about their business, to “accommodate” the religious beliefs of employees. Moreover, Obama is selective, government can make Christians can go against their beliefs, but government must force businesses to “accommodate” the religious beliefs of Muslims.

Make no mistake. Obama has many like-thinking allies among progressives, women’s groups, the LGBT leaders from central casting, and secular Christians and secular Jews like Bernie Sanders who is not remotely a practicing or observant Jew. Sander’s “spirituality” justifies not personal charity but stealing (i.e. socialism). Bernie was born Jewish but feels more comfortable with Palestinian victimhood than Zionist destiny. No wonder Bernie keeps harping on the need to bring more MOOSE-LUM refugees here.

Ask yourself whether their pro-Muslim approach is simple political correctness or moral depravity. Obama and his groupies charge the Republicans with a “War on Women” and an assault on “gay rights.” But the Muslim nations continue aggression against women and homosexuals, ranging from sexual mutilation, assault, and rape, to stoning and death. Contrary to the mainstream media, these practices are not confined to ISIS, but prevail in varying degree throughout the Muslim world, including countries that gave the Clinton Foundation big money and speaking fees to the Clintons. If you’re truly pro-women and pro-gay, stop admitting as immigrants a demographic group in which many of the immigrants, according to polls, believe in violence against women and gays and even believe someone who leaves the Muslim faith deserves the punishment of death. Is this just a different culture, or a threat to Western civilization and what this country is about?

Obama and the Democrats are obsessed about “Islamophobia” and “homophobia.” News bulletin: Muslims are not concerned about homophobia. The big phobia in American today is Christianphobia, part of a secular movement to marginalize Christianity in America.

Obama’s mosque visit is a gratuitous affront to the tens of thousands of Americans who have been maimed, and the memory of those killed, in confronting an Islamist revolution launched by President Jimmy Carter a generation ago when Carter maneuvered to overthrow the pro-Western, pro-reform Shah of Iran, and replace him with the Ayatollah. The religious fundamentalists were in Iran, but Carter fostered them. Wahhabi extremists have thrived in Saudi Arabia; our task was to inhibit them by discouraging the Saudi royal family from supporting Wahhabis.

Everyone knows that America has patriotic and decent Muslims, including many who loyally serve in the military and law enforcement. And surely we need Muslim allies throughout the world to help against radical Muslim, Islamists, Jihadists, or whatever term you use, that Obama will not. But the Muslim leadership around the world and in this country is reluctant, at best, to take on the Islamist thugs that they say “hijacked their religion.” Surely many Muslims left the keys in the pickup truck for the Islamist hijackers, or the house door unlocked for the Islamist home invasion. Why can’t we allow some Muslims here and reject those who reject us?

On a good day, we are told by the Council on American Relations (CAIR) that Israel is the reason that Muslim terrorists, in the name of their religion, are attacking innocents in countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, South America. Or we are told the United States is at fault because of something we did, like supporting the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia. Can you imagine Christians or Jews justifying Christian or Jewish terrorism by citing some sort of grievance?

Yesterday at the mosque President Obama did not send a message of religious pluralism, but of religious preference. Pluralism is what we had in this country before the Islamic invasion that is part of Obama’s legacy. If he wants to stop the alleged American bigotry against Muslims, perhaps it’s time for a moratorium until, as the politically incorrect Donald Trump said, “…until we can figure out what the hell is going on.” But are we not permitted to inquire of prospective Muslim immigrants their views on the West and Western values, America and the U.S. Constitution, Sharia and radical Islam?

Obama lectures Americans on how they should respect and revere Islam. Would it be appropriate to inquire of prospective Muslim immigrants their opinion of Jews and Judaism and of Christians and Christianity? Can we ask if they believe they would be bound by laws here, rather than by Sharia? Why doesn’t Obama talk about any of this?

Advocates of increased Muslim immigration raise the straw man of a religious test. But religion is already written into immigration law. And we know that religion is a legitimate proxy at this time, because a significant percentage of Muslims, according to assorted polls, believe in Sharia law, not Western law, and want to impose their religion on everyone else. Japan does not accept Muslim immigrants. Why not? Are they bigoted? Are they under some obligation to do so? Are we?

Perhaps it is inelegant to mention religion rather than some proxy criterion. But for years we’ve seen the incredibly costly Transportation Security Administration (TSA) body search bible-carrying Christian grandmothers rather than profile (what a terrible word) young men from the Middle East.

The mistake of Trump and the other Republican candidates and even Republican leaders in Congress is their myopic focus on national security, rather than being candid about the cultural disintegration of the West and the U.S. We keep hearing “if only one” Syrian refugee were a terrorist. We might have a white European tourist who is a terrorist. We already have homegrown Muslim terrorists. The real issue is importing Muslims with no commitment to America or a goal of assimilation, and they want to transform (a word favored by Obama, and now Bernie Sanders) America, into a Muslim-tolerant and then Muslim-dominated nation. And Jew haters and self-hating secular Jews are delighted at this influx because if we keep importing Muslims at Obama’s rate, they will outnumber the Jewish population and become a potent lobby against Israel.

We need a positive approach. If there is a massive Syrian refugee problem, then for the short term let Arab nations help them. They will be more at home, from a religious and cultural standpoint. And if peace is restored in Syria, let them return. Certainly some of the men should be fighting for their beliefs in their own country. Obama’s policy to transport these people across the ocean and make these people permanent residents and then citizens of the United States is absurd.

President Obama has, one expert on Europe and Islam told me, a messianic complex. As for Jews, Obama called himself an “honorary member of the tribe.” Further, he has said, “I am the closest thing to a Jew” to sit in the Oval Office. What an insult to those Jews who recognize Obama’s hostility toward Israel. Among Christians, he is somehow one of them. But recall that his spiritual mentor was America-hating, Jew-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright, with whom he spent two decades. And that brings us to Islam, within which Obama has a comfort level. His father was a Muslim. He says “the sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer… one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” Well, I’ve heard the Muslim call to prayer, when I was in Riyadh Saudi Arabia. I didn’t find it sweet or pretty. But who cares about my opinion? What’s important is that Muslims deserve to hear this sound, but not here. In most cities in this country, it would probably violate zoning laws and noise abatement. But maybe Obama’s attorney general will file suit against cities.

Historians can find ample evidence of the Judeo-Christian roots of America. Several of our founders knew Hebrew and studied the Bible in Hebrew. None of them knew Arabic or studied the Koran. That’s not a criticism of Islam, it’s just a fact. There are plenty of countries in the world in which Jews had no significant role. That’s not a criticism of Judaism, it’s just a fact. But Obama keeps talking about Muslim roots and Muslim traditions in America. Why patronize Muslims and spread historical revisionism, unless Obama has another agenda of increasing the number of Muslims in America and the Muslim impact on our nation? To say that Obama is a Muslim seems overdrawn. The bulk of Americans give him the benefit of the doubt and accept his self-description as a Christian, though his theological godfather Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology seems curious, at best. To say that Obama wants to increase the number of Muslims here dramatically, and the stature and standing of Islam in the U.S. is, if anything, an understated observation. We are entitled to inquire why?

Europe is already pursuing Islamization. Imagine if Mitt Romney were elected in 2012. Would he, as Barack Obama did, have made his first trip abroad to a Muslim nation and do a mea culpa speech about American guilt? Would he have encouraged and accelerated the Islamization of America? All this is part of Obama’s transformation of America into a secular, socialist Europe. But what the secular progressives and agnostic-atheist liberals don’t get is this: after the Islamists deal with the Jews, and then deal with the Christians, they will go after the ultimate non-believers, the secular-progressives, especially liberated women and identified homosexuals. Remember when Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union, it wasn’t enough to be a socialist; Stalin liquidated even freethinking and independent socialists.

After 9-11, we saw an understandable movement in public schools and colleges to teach more about Islam and the Mideast. But we have now moved effectively to advocacy. There is a politically correct force-feeding of Islamic values and beliefs, without critical evaluation or thinking. School curriculums pretend there is no conflict between Islam, as practiced by the vast majority of Muslims around the world, and Western values, American culture, and U.S. laws.

Ever since the late 1960s, Muslim terrorism has been a growing part of the international mosaic. Remember all the airplane hijacks four decades ago that spawned the intrusive international airport security and screening? What about Munich? The bombing of Pan Am flight 103? The Achille Lauro? The first World Trade Center attack? 9-11? Indonesian bombings in Bali and Jakarta?? Boston? San Bernardino? These are the more prominent of thousands of terrorist attacks mounted not, as liberal Bill Maher has reminded us, by blond Swedish women, but by Muslims.

Ever since he became president Obama has been quite literally obsessed with Islam. To a certain extent, a Muslim outreach makes sense. We need Muslims aboard to ally with us, against ISIS, but also against radical Islam, words that Obama will not speak. We have in the United States many patriotic Muslims who are assimilated into Western values and America. But these Muslims generally are not recent immigrants but have been here for a while. In some cases, we’re talking about a generation ago or even two generations.

In contrast, Barack Obama has increased immigration of a variety of Muslims who are far different from Muslims who came here years ago to be part of America, not question its very foundations and seek to change it into their own image. Many of the recent immigrants are not as educated and open-minded as the Muslims from years or decades ago. Back then, Muslims were more likely to accept the United States as it is, rather than change it to their image.

I’ve met and known Muslims for decades. Not many, to be sure. But I don’t recall their talk of Sharia law. In all this time, through my professional work and professional travel throughout the United States, I don’t recall seeing Muslim women in hijabs. This is just in the last decade, especially the last few years.

President Obama and his administration have made it a matter of U.S. policy to import as many Muslims as he can, as if there is some urgency to increase the Muslim share of the U.S. population. It’s a sort of affirmative action for Muslims. At the same time, we know that the persecution and killing of Christians within the Mideast has increased geometrically. The immigration ratio into the U.S. of Syrian Muslims to Syrian Christians is 97%/3%.

Obama and his allies in Congress and the media have compared the plight of Muslim refugees in general, and Syrian refugees in particular, to the suffering of Jewish refugees in the 1930s and early 1940s who had nowhere to go. Jews who came here then had Jewish sponsors here, and they went to work and resisted government help. They were pro-American and wanted to assimilate. They had no desire for special privilege or to impose their religious values on others. But Muslims are not being persecuted for their religion; the Jews were then, and the Christians are now. Christians are the “new” Jews, and they have nowhere to go.

Let’s remember that anyone reading this, regardless of your religion, or even if you are an agnostic or atheist, could go into any Protestant church, Catholic parish or Jewish synagogue in any city or community in the United States. That’s not true about your typical mosque. That’s the way it goes, it’s their prerogative. President Obama gets through the door. Can you?

Is there a serious need for the FBI to monitor incitement to violence in synagogues and churches in the United States? I’ve never been to a church or synagogue and heard words of hate. I’ve seen hateful excerpts from sermons by Obama’s spiritual mentor who claims to be a Christian. President Obama keeps talking about “hate crimes” directed against Muslims. A so-called hate crime is an Orwellian expression. Remember George Orwell’s 1984, where the state orchestrates “two minutes of hate” against an enemy of the state. We need to prosecute people who initiate violence against others, and not get into “thought crimes.”

Obama said yesterday “an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths.” Go on American campuses. Muslims are not under siege. Jews are. And look through the Mideast: Muslims are ridding their countries of the few remaining Christians, and are persecuting, assaulting, and killing Christians. That’s what Obama should be addressing, instead of visiting a mosque. I was in Saudi Arabia. My hosts made it clear they did not respect the Jewish religion or the Christian religion. Obama urges Americans to respect, even admire Islam. I don’t expect Muslims to admire Judaism or Christianity. But our religious pluralism and religious freedom are based on a respect for the religious rights of others. Many Muslims I know here do respect the faith of others. They are peaceful. But that simply is not true among many more recent Muslim arrivals; more recently, they want — ultimately through force — to create an Islamic nation here, as part of an Islamic world.

The Arab world must wonder what kind of jerk our president is — he projects a lack of concern for Christians. He telegraphs, at best, apathy; at worst, he sides with Islam. Is it a war against the Muslim world for this nation to prioritize helping Christians who are being persecuted solely because of the faith — and persecuted by Muslims? Why are we instead taking in Muslim refugees when most Arab nations will not? Where is Obama’s leadership to express our concern for these refugees and to encourage Arab nations (other than mainly Jordan) to step up to the plate for the Muslim refugees? That would be presidential leadership.

Meanwhile Obama at the mosque injected partisan politics with an attack on Donald Trump: “We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.” In reporting on Obama’s mosque visit, the New York Times notedthat a poll just a few months ago showed that 29 percent of Americans think he is a Muslim. All things considered, that’s pretty low. I guess the others think he’s a Jeremiah Wright Christian.

Obama insists Islam is a religion of peace. But even if we forget about the Muslim focus on destroying Israel, or radical Islam’s celebration of terrorism: How is it that through centuries, up until right now, Muslims are killing each other on a grand scale, in the name of Islam? Are there any current wars of Jews killing Jews, or Christians killing Christians?”

In his talk yesterday Obama added, almost parenthetically, that persecution of Christians in the Mideast and anti-Semitism are not good things. The applause among the Muslims was muted.

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