Obama’s politically correct spin on Islam grows more and more
buffoonish. At the very moment he accuses Christians of waging a
“war on women,” he casts Islam as a benevolent religion to which
the Sandra Flukes could take refuge.
He used his
remarks at this year’s Iftar dinner to praise Islam as a
female-friendly religion. “Indeed, you know that the Koran teaches,
‘Be it man or woman, each of you is equal to the other,’” he said.
For Obama, it is the Bible, not the Koran, that reeks of dangerous
patriarchy. Obama has mocked the Book of Leviticus, Deuteronomy,
and St. Paul’s letters, but he would never dare question a passage
in the Koran, which he regards as a holy and blameless book in no
need of politically correct revision.
If the oppression at Georgetown gets to be too much for Sandra
Fluke, she could always try her luck in the Islamic world, where
the rights of women are spreading like wildfire, according to
Obama. Thanks in part to Islam, he said, this year’s Olympics can
be dubbed “The Year of the Woman,” as Muslim countries generously
allowed a few women to play: “Also, for the very first time in
Olympic history, every team now includes a woman athlete. And one
of the reasons is that every team from a Muslim-majority country
now includes women as well.”
Obama was particularly pleased that women got the chance to
“face down tanks” in the Arab Spring. Nothing proves sameness
between the sexes better than the equal opportunity to die.
Obama seemed unable to get his favorite constituency off his
mind, excitedly noting that one of the first “Muslim chaplains at
an American college” is a woman, Sanaa Nadim. How did the imams in
attendance at the dinner feel about that remark? No doubt they
murmur to themselves that Obama is an idiot, albeit a very useful
one.
Obama also peppered his speech with his customary deceptions
about America’s Islamic-friendly origins. “As I’ve noted before,
Thomas Jefferson once held a sunset dinner here with an envoy from
Tunisia — perhaps the first Iftar at the White House, more than
200 years ago,” he said. Notice Obama’s weasely use of the
word “perhaps.” Why the hedging? Because he knows perfectly well
that it wasn’t an Iftar dinner but a war negotiation. Seeking to
end the Barbary War with Islamic pirates, Jefferson invited
Tunisian envoy Sidi Soliman Mellimelli to Washington. He invited
him to a dinner at the White House not to honor Islam but to end a
war. The dinner happened to coincide with Ramadan. Jefferson pushed
the time back for the dinner to “sunset” in order to ensure that
Mellimelli would attend. It wasn’t by any stretch of the
imagination an Iftar dinner.
But Obama wasn’t done misleading his audience. “And some of you,
as you arrived tonight, may have seen our special display, courtesy
of our friends at the Library of Congress — the Koran that
belonged to Thomas Jefferson. And that’s a reminder, along with the
generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam— like so
many faiths — is part of our national story.” He failed to mention
that Jefferson purchased the Koran in order to understand the
attitudes and tactics of the Barbary pirates. For Jefferson, it
wasn’t a holy book but a manual for war. No mention of that on the
placard near the “special display.” (If Obama really wanted to wow
his Muslim friends, he should have shown them “Jefferson’s Bible”
over at the Smithsonian’s History Museum, which is a tribute to
TJ’s secularist tastes in that he deleted from his copy of the
Bible all references to the supernatural. Jefferson’s secularized
Bible foreshadowed the left-wing Christianity that Obama now
espouses.)
Obama concluded his remarks with an absurdly hypocritical paean
to “freedom of religion.” As he purges Christianity from public
life, forbidding any public application of it that conflicts with
his liberal dictates, Obama has the gall to gush about religious
freedom as a “universal right.” In Obama’s envisioned America,
Islam belongs to the “national story” while Judeo-Christianity
marks a chapter best forgotten.
