The headline of the week (from the AP): “Some militants respond
positively to Obama speech.” It is perhaps instructive to take a
headline like this and replace today’s evildoers with one from
the past and see what you come up with: “Some Nazis respond
positively to Roosevelt’s address.” Or, “Some Mongol Warlords
have nice things to say about Pope Innocent’s bull.”
Now read the entire story
and one finds the lone example of a positive response to
President Obama’s Cairo speech comes from some Egyptian named
Essam Derbala, a leader of the Islamic militant group al-Gamaa
al-Islamiyya Al-Qaida. Derbala is said to have “told an Egyptian
newspaper over the weekend that the Taliban should reciprocate by
announcing they will no longer target Americans.” The obvious
problem is the Taliban could care less what some guy in Egypt
thinks they should or should not do. Nor are they likely to give
American soldiers a free pass when U.S. troops are still trying
to kill them.
Meanwhile my local newspaper today reports that “a Canadian
soldier and an Afghan boy died in…attacks by the [Taliban]
extremist insurgency…” If — as a result of Obama’s speech — the
Taliban are now targeting Canadian rather than American troops,
Prime Minister Stephen Harper had better start brushing up on his
Koran and get on the first jet to Cairo.
There is nothing in this or any other story I’ve seen to suggest
extremists have had a change of heart toward the U.S. And writing
a curious and misleading headline won’t make it so.
Of course, if you can’t find a militant to say that Americans are
now welcome in the Islamic world, you can always find some Yankee
Think-Tanker who will put those or similar words in the
collective Muslim mouth. “Obama may have managed to ‘plant the
seed of doubt in some minds’ of extremists, said Robert Malley,
of the International Crisis Group,” according to the AP
story. “Seed of doubt” is a lovely metaphor, sort of like
“the cloud of unknowing,” but it is unclear what doubts
extremists had planted in their fertile brains. Are they having
doubts whether America is still the Great Satan? So they doubt
whether Western culture is still decadent? Or, more likely, are
they having doubts about the West’s commitment to defeat the
Taliban and Al Qaeda?
Malley continued: “There was enough … that represented openings
for those who wanted openings.” Some might say the notion that
extremists and terrorists are looking for peace openings is the
height of naïveté. If they wanted peace would they be blowing up
mosques and Humvees? Pundits sometimes forget that not everyone
is as awestruck with Obama and his message as they are. To
Islamic militants, Obama is just the latest representative of
earthly evil.
ON THE CONTRARY the story suggests that nearly all Islamic
militants responded negatively to Obama’s speech and did so, not
because they weren’t swept away on a tide of pro-Western good
feelings, but because they feared alienating or irritating their
fellow militants. Here’s how the AP put it:
Two influential fundamentalist groups, Lebanon’s Iranian-backed
Hezbollah and Egypt’s opposition Muslim Brotherhood, as well as
a Saudi preacher, accused Obama of being deceptive. They said
he offered soft words to hide unchanged anti-Muslim positions.
But that could indicate their nervousness that Obama’s strategy
could undercut support for militancy.
You see how it works? When militant leaders say Obama is a liar,
they don’t really mean that Obama is a liar. They only say Obama
is a liar because they are nervous about losing support among
their bloodthirsty militant backers. It’s a kind of doublespeak
that only AP reporters are privy too.
The story would have us believe the Islamic militants’ “positive
response” is due largely to Obama’s doomed Israel Policy. This
policy — destined to go down in history as a corollary to
Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement — is to appease extremists by
taking a tougher line with Israel. This is a popular notion
throughout the Arab punditocracy. “Extremists will only be
disarmed when the U.S. takes a more neutral stand on Israel,”
says Abdel Wahab al-Qasab, a Qatar-based analyst. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, doesn’t give a damn about
Obama’s appeasement policy. Netanyahu ran for the premiership on
a platform that included “natural growth” within the Jerusalem
municipality, an area that includes Arab East Jerusalem and parts
of the West Bank captured in a 1967 Middle East war. He intends
to hold to that.
The story does get one thing right. The region is growing more
militant, not less so. Largely because hatred of the U.S. is the
militants’ bread and butter. Without that hatred the militants
and their big dollar supporters will simply put away their purses
and go home to watch Law & Order: Crimes Against the
Prophet Unit. Anti-Americanism is the strongest glue known
to mankind. It holds the weak European Left together and it binds
militant Islam. It is the raison
d’être for most of the world’s
tinpot dictatorships. Selling out Israel will not make the paste
any less sticky.
