The American Spectator

The Obama Watch

Do the Muslims in Egypt (a country that imprisons people for sodomy), who listened with rapt and admiring attention as Barack Obama confidently discoursed on the meaning of their "tolerant" religion, know that immediately before he left D.C. for Cairo he had issued a proclamation declaring June "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month"?

Had Osama Bin Laden wanted to discredit Obama in the eyes of global Muslims, he should have junked his own insane gibberish and simply read from Obama's LGBT proclamation: "My Administration has partnered with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world."

So much for the sodomy laws of Islamic countries.

Naturally, Obama didn't say a word in his Cairo speech about this delicate matter. These are valued "allies," after all. He even pandered a bit to Islam's dim view of rotten Western mores, lamenting the Internet's child-corrupting "offensive sexuality."

Would that be the same offensive sexuality designed to corrupt kids on display in your omnivorously perverse proclamation? His proclamation speaks of LGBT "youth" and the "harassment" they face, as if America is teeming with 16-year-olds who have gotten sex-change operations in brave defiance of their peers, as if it is the president's duty to encourage teens in bisexual explorations.

At any rate, the media purred over the "credibility" that Obama enjoys in the Muslim world. If so, it is a credibility based on either cluelessness or cynicism: perhaps Muslims don't know about Obama's turbo-secularism, or, if they do, they just don't care, figuring that they at least share a common enemy --Christianity.

Obama announced once again, gratuitously and absurdly, that America is not "at war" with Islam. When was Bush at war with Islam? As I recall, Bush spent much of his time after 9/11 making unconvincing cooing noises about the "moderation" of Muslims and assigned Karen Hughes to push this PC propaganda in the Middle East.

Okay, Obama is not at war with Islam, but he is very much in a culture war with Christianity, denying rights to pro-life doctors and nurses at home even as he promises greater respect to Muslims abroad.

His Cairo speech contained a familiar assortment of jaw-dropping whoppers and jumbled half-truths. The White House proudly announced that this syncretistic stream of deceptions will be translated into a dozen languages.

Does Mark Penn feel vindicated this morning? Remember Hillary's sly formulation, no doubt picked up from Penn, that "as far as she knew" Obama wasn't a Muslim, not long after she dispatched Bill and Chelsea to ham it up as Christians with Joel Osteen in Texas? Obama, working hard to impress his audience yesterday, conformed perfectly to Penn's image of him, saying that he hails from "generations of Muslims," and that he "spent several years" immersed in Indonesian Muslim culture where "he heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk."

The more non-Western a religion is, the more Obama cottons to it. Ever the critic of the West, Obama declared casually that Islam made possible "Europe's renaissance and enlightenment."

America, he argued, has learned a lot from it too: "Islam has always been part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco." He didn't bother to mention that Muslim pirates were also some of the first ones to wage war against America, thus making the Treaty of Tripoli necessary.

Obama added that "when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same holy Quran that one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, kept in his personal library." Too bad he didn't mention that Jefferson had purchased it in order to understand the tactics of the Muslim pirates.

Obama's glib solipsism is bottomless. Whether telling Catholics at Notre Dame what Christianity means or Muslims in Cairo what Islam means, he simply substitutes his narcissistic liberalism for the subject at hand; all religious roads lead back not to God but to him.

topics:
Islam, Middle East