Obama’s Tu-Quoque On Behalf Of Islam

He can’t any longer keep pretending that there’s nothing wrong with Islam. Now that he has to admit, begrudingly, that, he’s found it necessary to remind everyone that “we do it too.” The “we” here is Christianity, a religion with a universalist claim. And he mentions the Crusades, and some of the apologetics for slavery. The Crusades, however, took place after nearly 500 years of steady Muslim conquest of formerly Christian (and Jewish) lands, of the destruction of many churches, the conversion — forced conversion, really, because it was done under great duress, the duress of the Jizyah and other disabilities that, taken together, were often crushing — of Christians (and Jews, and Zoroastrians) to Islam, and then,in 1006, the razing of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (by the Caliph Hamid in Egypt) and  attacks on Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land for nearly a century that followed. The Jihad in Islam applies to the whole world, and has been conducted against non-Muslims since the beginning of Islam, and will never end. The Crusades were limited in both time — less than 200 years — and space, for the Christians wanted only to wrest control of the Holy Land, not conquer all of the territories under Muslim rule, and certainly not the entire world,.

As for slavery, it is true that someChrisitans, casting about for justification for the institution (not a “peculiar” institution at all, but one that had been found practiced all over the world, in many different societies, over long periods) in biblical passages, chiefly in the Old Testment tales about Noah’s progeny. But the immediate reply to Obama — which should have been given — is that slavery was ended in Christendom but not in Islam, until Western pressure became too great. The Arab slave trade began earlier, ended later, and was much more deadly — especially because of the conditions of castration of the young black boys who were most desired by Arab slave masters. There was no Muslim Wilberforce. Slavery in the Muslim lands ended only when the West insisted upon it — and it ended, formally, in Saudi Arabia only in 1962. It continues to this day in the Sudan and Mauritania, wherre Arabs openly enslave blacks, and the treatment of domestic workers, and their status, in Saudi Arabia and in some of the sheiiklets amounts so slavery. Jesus did not own slaves, but Muhammad did, and the Qur’an and Hadith legitimize, forever, the institution of slavery.

Was there no one at the Prayer Breakfast who could have stood up and said this? It would have made an impression. And that is what has to be done with Barack Obama — drag him out of his o’erweening self-satisfaction, his ignorance and his remarkable incuriosity, about everything having to do with Islam, save for his tender memories ofe living in Indonesia from the ages of six to nine, and chasing chickens barefoot, and listening to the sound of the call to prayer, the “sweetest sound” he’s ever heard. He had decades to learn a little more about Islam. Apparently he hasn’t felt the need.