Barack Obama,
junior partner in the new Faith-Based Initiative!
The number of liberal progressives that bought into George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative was few and far between. Religion? Bah! Humbug! Easter egg hunts at the White House? Isn’t that what the druids did at Stonehenge? They should be abolished! It’s time to strike off the chains! If Rosie O’Donnell and Bill Maher wouldn’t trust a Catholic priest anywhere near a ten-year-old why should the rest of us and as for shelling out those big bucks so some black kid can matriculate at Pope Pius XII Elementary instead of at PS Six-and-seven-eights is worse than sending him to Baldur von Schirach for indoctrination into the Hitler Jugend.
Sure.
So look at what Barack Obama has done to their dream of
making religion a distant memory! He is going to bring his own religious
adviser into the White House. That’s right! And it won’t be someone spouting
liberation theology. It won’t have anything to do with liberation. The adviser
will be Dalia Mogahed, an Egyptian-born Muslim, and a Senior Analyst at Gallup.
Obama appointed Dalia as special White House adviser to the White House Office
of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Dalia spent six years working with
John Esposito of Georgetown University polling Muslims in countries round the
world for the Gallup people. The result was: Who Speaks For Islam, What a Billion Muslims Really Think, the biggest and most comprehensive study of
the Muslim public ever!
A billion! It isn’t easy figuring out what a billion people think. Sam Malone never did figure out that Cliff Claven was thinking and Cliff was only one percent of the Cheers population. But a billion Muslims! It was an ambitious project.
And what did they discover? Well, for one thing, Muslims are just like other people. American-Muslims, in fact, are as American as apple pie; as American as Ronnie Reagan and Hop Sing; as moderate as Tex Ritter and Dobie Gillis; as mainstream as the Cunninghams and the Bumsteads; no more religious than the next guy, the perfect citizen. George S. Patton would have wanted an Army full of these people. So would Mohammed.
Dalia’s job will be to brief Obama on what’s happening in the Muslim community, open up new channels and improve the image of Islam in America. “The key idea of the council,” said Dalia, “is to tap into the energy and wisdom of religious organizations and leaders who focus on faith groups to solve common problems.”
Maybe they can take care of that jizya thing before it gets out of hand. Right now America seems headed for a terrible doom.
Dr. John Esposito, Dalia’s partner in the Gallup poll, is professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown and director of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal center for Muslim-Christian understanding. Esposito and Mogahed co-authored an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times promoting their poll. The title of the article: Muslim true/false. What you think you knew about them is likely to be wrong—and that’s dangerous, raises many questions
“Our public diplomacy program,” runs the article, “has made little progress on improving America’s image. Few seem to recognize that American ignorance of Muslims has been the fatal flaw.”
Fortunately, Muslims have a perfect understanding of America and even on the slight chance they might have some skewed notions of what the Declaration of Independence and the separation of Church and State mean it would be insensitive to bring it up.
Obviously, there is considerable ignorance on both sides.
George W. Bush’s ‘fatal flaw’ was in thinking Islam had been hijacked by terrorists. If Osama bin Laden or al-Zarqawi or the Duka boys had run off with Islam, certainly Tariq Ramadan and Anjem Choudary would have rounded up a posse and given chase. That’s what Rooster Cogburn would have done. But that’s not what happened. Nothing changed; no mosques were closed and the victims sent money to the hijackers. George W. Bush was mistaken.
Esposito and Mogahed could not resist sprinkling the op-ed with ‘statistics’ from their study. It seems Americans are more bloodthirsty than Muslims. Yes, it’s true. “Polls show that 6% of the American public think attacks in which civilians are targeted are ‘completely justified,’” said the article. “In Saudi Arabia, the figure is 4%. In Lebanon and Iran, it’s 2%.”
A Kuwaiti said bombing is ‘completely unjustified’ because it is against the teachings of the Qur’an.
Qur’an: 2:191 “And kill them wherever you find and catch them. Drive them out of from where they have turned you out; for Al-Fitnah (polytheism, disbelief, oppression) is worse than slaughter.”
That surah would have made Yul Brynner’s hair stand on end.
An Indonesian said the Qur’an prohibited the killing of innocents. That is commendable but once again it depends on what is is. Some people are more innocent than others. Omar Bakri has said there is no such thing as an innocent non-Muslim. A couple of years ago when terrorists exploded several bombs in Algeria that killed mostly Muslims, all Algeria was outraged. The terrorists were told in no uncertain terms to kill Christians. One Muslim theologian has estimated the number of innocent non-Muslims to be two or three thousand.
Bassam Tibi, a German-Syrian scholar and a Muslim reformist says there is confusion as to the meanings of certain words. “Firstly,” he says, “Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them. The word ‘peace,’ for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam—or ‘House of Islam’—to the entire world.”
It is the peace of Hitler’s lebensraum. And it is being extended into the White House. Who will tell the President? Mogahed?
The Los Angeles Times article concluded with the following warning: “Rather than allow extremists on either side to dictate how we discuss Islam and the West, we need to listen carefully to the voices of ordinary people. Our victory in the war on terrorism depends on it.”
Esposito and Mogahed are not ordinary people. Eliot Ness and Rooster Cogburn were ordinary people—ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things. To listen to Esposito and Magahed would be to win the war on terror by losing it and to win the peace for Islam by losing that which makes the rest of the world free.
Obama had better keep a hotline open to Franklin Graham.