Obama’s Unspeakable Speech, And The Duty To Instruct

How many Americans know what is in the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Sira? How many of them know about little Aisha, or the Khaybar Oasis, or the murder of the bound prisoners of the Banu Quryaza? How many know about Abu ‘Akaf, or Asma bint Marwan, or Kaf bin Ashraf? How many know that Muhammad is regarded as the Model of Conduct and the Perfect Man? How many know what is in the Shari’a, or even what the Shari’a is? How many know anything about what the great Western scholars of Islam — C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, and dozens of others — wrote about Islam? How many know what those who, in the relative safety of the West, have abandoned Islam and testified truthfuly as to its texts, teachings, attitudes, atmospherics, such people as Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have written?

Those who presume to rule in the governments of the West, have a duty both to physically protect those in whose name they govern, and to instruct them too. Misleading people, keeping them confused, not allowing them to understand clearly the nature of the threat, constitutes a dereliction of duty.

The failure of imagination that Obama has displayed, his inability or unwillingness to figure out how to speak truthfully, nor not untruthfully, about Islam, and about those who take Islam to heart, dismays. Even if he thinks that he cannot address the threat of Islam directly, he can do so obliquely, by desribing as the enemy those who do not believe in pluralism, and who are set on “engaging in what they call Jihad, or the struggle, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of their faith. And of particular worry, though by no means the only ones who worry, are those who wish to engage in violent Jihad, whether through conventional combat or terrorism.”

He’s left out the word “Islam” thus avoiding what he and his courtiers consider to be”insulting” to Islam. But El-Sisi would not be insulted. He knows the problem, and he spoke about it at Al-Azhar without using such absurd phrases as “a perversion of Islam. ” The rulers of the United Arab Emirates don’t worry about “insulting” Islam; they are more worried about Barack Obama’s failure to speak at all sensibly about the matter, even by employing synecdoche, rather than speaking directly, to implicate Islam.

And why for god’s sake, does Obama have to make remarks that are both untrue and nauseating? Why does he have to insist that Muslims in America “are making extraordinary contributions” to our society? What is he talkng about? What “extraordinary contributions”? This is in the line of his insensate speech in Cairo a few years ago, when he insisted that Islam “has always been a part of America” What part of America is that? It cannot be the part that has to do with the Bill of Rights, and the American Constitution, because in Islam the legitimacy of the government depends not on the will expressed, however imperfectly, by the people, but on the will expressed by Allah, set down in the Qur’an, and glossed by the Sunnah. Islam has nothing to do with freedom of conscience, because in the Sharia’ apostasy is punishable by death. Islam has nothing to do with free expression, because it forbids and punishes severely any criticism of Islam and, especially, of Muhammad. Islam has nothing to do with anything in the American Constitution. Obama is confusing a fact — that there are now Muslims in the Western world — with the civilisation of the West, which owes nothing to, and has for 1400 years been opposed by, the adherents of Islam.

His remarks these last few days, at this comically-titled Summit on Violent Extremism, have been so self-evidently silly that it’s actually good. It’s obvious to all, and not only to a few, that what he and Kerry and the others have been pushing does not accord either with the contents of the texts of Islam, or with the obsrervable behavior of Muslims around the world, both those who engage in atrocities, and those who attempt to deny that such atrocities “have anything to do with Islam.”