What Obama and the Media Don’t Know or Care to Report

by Norman Berdichevsky (July 2009)

…”These are all Muslims fighting Muslims. after some of them raised the slogan “Islam is the solution”, their Islam has become the problem. As soon as any number of them acquire weapons, they raise them against the government, even when the government also rules in the name of ‘Islam’.  A quick glance at what the media shows us demonstrates how the word ‘Islam’ and its derivatives becomes plaything in their hands.” (May 17, 2008).

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

For Obama, the only flies in the idyllic ointment of Islam are the “extremists”, named in his speech as Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Hamas, yet nothing in their stern adherence to the fundamentals of Islam and desire to institute sharia law based on the Koran evokes open contradiction by any clerical circles in the broader “Muslim world”. Hamas did indeed win an “election” in Gaza and has broad popular appeal there. To diminish this appeal, Obama and others demand in knee-jerk reflex action that Israel become more vulnerable and put its head on the chopping block.

Even more grotesque are the major portions of the speech equating what the self conflicted  “Muslim World” and the United States are supposed to share – their concern with human rights and religious tolerance….

Yet his unyielding belief that these values exist or are respected in the Muslim world must be based on his ignorance that every one of the majority Muslim countries in the world has NOT signed the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights but subscribes to their own “Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights” (UIDHR), signed at Cairo in which predominantly Muslim countries take expressed issue with the U.N. Declaration for its perceived failure to take into account the cultural and religious context of Non-Western countries. The document was adopted on August 5, 1990 by 45 foreign ministers of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to serve as a guideline for the member states in matters of human rights.

In a secular understanding of the Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion or to atheism.”
 

In a joint written statement submitted by the
All of these distortions, omissions, euphemisms and obfuscations were present in President Obama’s “even-handed” Cairo speech equating the Holocaust with the displacement of part of the Palestinian Arab population, the direct outcome of Arab aggression designed to deny the Jews any legal territorial possession in part of what had been the Palestinian mandate established on the basis of the Balfour Declaration incorporated into The Treaty of Sevres with Ottoman Turkey and the League of Nations San Remo Conference, adopted on April 25, 1920. It and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations were the documents upon which the Mandate for Palestine was constructed and predicated on the basis of a Jewish National Home. This world recognition of Jewish historic rights and not the Holocaust provided the legal foundation for a modern Jewish state.

Neither Obama nor any other American president has simply told the truth to the Muslim World that it was the USSR and its satellite state Czechoslovakia that provided the Israelis their only air-force and heavy weapons to wage the War of Independence that defeated the invading British and French trained and equipped Arab armies in 1948 and that apart from Muslim states and a few countries with large Muslim minorities, practically, the entire world community including the communist block represented at the U.N. in 1948 voted for a Jewish state and allowed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants to reach Israel and join in the battle. Why this is an “inconvenient truth” to American presidents and the State Department remains a mystery to me today – would it offend Muslim sensibilities to know that their irrational hatred of America is misplaced or that sympathies for the Jewish cause in 1948 included the entire Communist block?

Repeated offers to create a “Palestinian state” (it cannot be “restored” like the Jewish state because no such state existed in he past) have been frustrated much more by the outright refusal of the Grand Mufti, Arafat, Abbas, Hamas & Company than any Israeli government to accept a just compromise.

True to his belief (superstition would be a better term) that …..”Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition” where he repeats the fundamental error of confusing the 780 year old occupation of parts of Spain under Islam with what was an interval of tolerance in Andalucia under Muslim rule lasting for less than 300 years that ended in chaos, political fragmentation into rival feuding Muslim mini-states, and fanaticism. The initial Arab invasion of 711 was followed by two subsequent Berber incursions and conquests by the Almoravids (1086) and Almohades (1147).

By 1020, many of the Jews under Muslim rule in Andalucia had fled to find refuge in the more tolerant Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in Northern Spain. They prospered there under regimes of tolerance (Alfonso VI The Brave, Alfonso X – The Wise and Jaime I) for 350 years. The eleventh century saw major Muslim pogroms against Jews in Spain in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. In the 1066 Granada massacre, a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews.

Medina Azahara (Madinat al-Zahra) was a palatial retreat outside of Cordoba meaning “City of Zahra”, a favorite concubine of the Caliph who built this site. It was the most magnificent and sumptuous palace in Moorish Spain and was utterly destroyed in the early 11^th century. By whom?  The Crusaders? The Jews ? The Pope and his Inquisition? El Cid?  Charlton Heston? No, the correct answer is fanatical, Muslim Berber mercenaries from North Africa who resented the hated Arab Ummayyad Caliphs and their racist anti-Black attitudes at that time.

Obama’s attempts to expand on Muslim tolerance and achievement are faulty to say the least but his linking the “Muslim World” to American history is simply absurd when he quoted John Adams ….”The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second president, John Adams, wrote, The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.”

This 1796 quote was written when Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe had no direct knowledge whatsoever with Islam or any familiarity with Muslim societies. All of them later, during the period 1801-1815, subscribed to the absolute necessity to confront the Barbary Pirates to end the scourge of piracy and the unprovoked attacks on American and European merchant vessels, the capture and the enslavement of their crews for ransom by the various vicious Muslim “Deys” – the rulers of the North African states.
 
All four of these American presidents, despite their initial reluctance to raise taxes, empower a modern navy and send thousands of American sailors and marines across the Atlantic to fight a protracted war, became aware of the utter hopelessness of dealing with Muslim rulers who proclaimed their inherent right to act in this aggressive manner because the Koran commanded them to do so against infidels who under the Koran enjoyed no rights whatsoever.

Apparently someone among Obama’s close advisors got to him in time to advise him not to repeat the inane statement he gave in an interview with French television just prior to his Cairo speech….“Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, that if you actually took the number of Muslims, Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.  And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.”

Based solely on the estimated total number of Muslims, “One of the largest” works out to a ranking of 38^th largest for the United States. Obama’s “point” would be typical of an American seventh grader giving a term paper before his Muslim teacher and anxious to impress her but not careful enough to distinguish between countries with a Muslim majority and a Muslim minority. It is factual but an anathema for Obama to openly admit and state that America is THE LARGEST CHRISTIAN MAJORITY nation in the WORLD. By the same inane logic of his French TV statement, it would be just as accurate for Obama to call America …”The “LARGEST JEWISH NATION in the World” or “The
Similarly incongruent is Obama’s assignment of progress in many technical and artistic fields such as when he spoke of “the innovation in Muslim communities that produced our mastery of pens and printing”. Anyone interested in learning where the first works printed with movable type in the Ottoman Empire appeared will learn that they were produced in the Hebrew language by Jewish scholars in Constantinople (David Nahmias, 1503) and in the Palestinian town of Safed (Eliezer Ashkenazi, 1577) more than 200 years before the first printed book in Arabic (Aleppo, Syria. 1707), but who cares about facts?

This is not pedantic sophistry. It is not meant to deny the importance of achievements made within Muslim societies, or of welcoming Muslim immigrants who desire to be peaceful and loyal citizens of the United States, and some form of American outreach to the world’s Muslims, but one that must be honest and clearly demonstrate that they have had no better friend among the great powers than the United States which had no colonial past in the Middle East, which unlike the Soviet Union, did not covet their territory or deny them religious rights, which has provided massive relief and food aid in every critical emergency to beleaguered areas, and has been a prime victim of terrorism perpetrated by a common enemy that many Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere have seen committed against themselves in the name of Jihad.
 

Obama’s knowledge of Israel lacks all depth. His pleas to the Palestinians to avoid violence because it doesn’t work and then using what he sees as “parallel” examples to imitate the non-violent techniques of Afro-Americans in the South or Black Africans under Apartheid is shameful, ludicrous and obscene. The Israel he now regards as a liability remains our only dependable real ally in the turbulent region and the only country in the area where elementary civil rights are protected.
Look and listen – Open your eyes and ears in Israel and you will experience a language, an art, a music, food and clothing, architecure, design, sports and recreation that draw from both East and West. 

Critics of Israel who paint it as a European colonial effort are silent on the expulsion and forced resettlement, loss of property and violence inflicted on the indigenous Middle Eastern Jews in 1947-49 numbering more than 800,000 and treat the divide between Jews of European and Afro-Asian origin in caustic terms.  These critics apparently have painted a picture that is easier for Obama to relate to in terms entirely borrowed from American sociology and politics that describe Israel as a WASP establishment (White-Ashkenazi from Central & Eastern Europe) and a colored or Black underclass of Afro-Asians.

Practically all of Israel’s Black African-Ethiopian population numbering more than 100,000 today are darker in complexion than Obama.  For all his knowledge about the “Black experience”, it is remarkable that Obama has never found occasion to praise the remarkable evacuation of 15,000 Black African Jews in one day on May 23, 1991 – Operation Salomon rescuing them from certain mass violence and their joyous reception in Israel. Every segment of the Israeli political spectrum from the Far Left to the Far Right agreed that this was one of Israel’s finest moments. When or where else were destitute Black African refugees joyously welcomed and integrated by “whites” claiming to be their brothers and sisters? in Obama’s Chicago?;at the Reverend Wright’s church?

In spite of his many declarations to fight “negative stereotypes” (about Islam), he cannot escape the stereotypes imparted by the Reverend Wright, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Father Pfleger, mentors for whom “The Jews” (Israelis no exception) were and remain the chief among “white oppressors”, “racists” and guilty of dispossessing the Palestinians. To comment on this article, please click here.