Thursday 4 June, 2009

World
Politics
Middle East

By Charles Gardner

President Obama will clearly have won some friends with his efforts in Cairo today to reach out to the Muslim world and clear up apparent misunderstandings of America’s attitude to Islam.

He made the right noises by emphasising the so-called indignities suffered on a daily basis by Palestinians and of the illegal way that Israel has been building settlements on ‘occupied’ land. And he made sure of bringing balance to the equation by stressing the “unbreakable bond” the United States has with Israel and that, though his administration is pushing for a ‘two-state solution’ to the Middle East crisis, they weren’t about to desert their Jewish friends.

No matter how conciliatory his message, however, it would never be considered enough for the Islamic fundamentalists – Iran, Syria and their proxies Hezbollah and Hamas – who refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

Obama is no doubt trying to correct a perception that America is at war with Islam, but is likely to have done little to remind his audience of how American soldiers have bled and died for Muslims and that to be treated with the kind of vicious hatred that brought on the mass murder of 9/11 hardly indicated gratitude for their actions.

Of course the U.S. had declared a ‘war on terror’, not Muslims – it’s just that the terrorists in mind (in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere) happen to be fanatical Islamists who believe they are doing a service for God by killing ‘infidels’.

So the perception that the West is being anti-Islam is hard to avoid. But the fundamentalists seize on this to justify their actions which are, if taken literally, backed up by the Muslim holy book (the Koran) which encourages the murder of Jews, Christians and Islamists who turn their back on the faith.

Where all this leaves Barack Obama is hard to fathom as, by his own admission, he comes from a Muslim background but has evidently rejected it in favour of a form of Christianity. He may have been applauded by the students in Cairo when he was quoting the Koran, but there are many in the world who would regard him as an ‘infidel’ and, as Lifebite suggested during the Presidential campaign, he is surely putting himself in the firing line by openly courting the Muslim world in the way he is doing.

Dennis Prager of JewishWorldReview.com has written an imaginary speech he believes the American President might have given with an honest appraisal of the situation.

For instance, he could have quoted Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who noted that in the last 20-30 years Americans engaged in five military campaigns on behalf of Muslims, each one resulting in the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims – in which 43 Americans were killed – were all humanitarian exercises,” states Prager. “In none of them was there a significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. So, in fact, in these 20 years my country has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any other nation, Muslim or non-Muslim.”

And yet they became the object of hatred, mass murder and economic attack from Muslim individuals, groups and countries.

Among examples was the 1979 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, which led to American diplomats being held hostage for 14 months, along with the 1998 bombing of their embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania, killing 23 Americans and 280 Kenyans.

“Then, on September 11 2001, nineteen Muslims who had been living in America slit the throats of American pilots and flight attendants and then flew airplanes into civilian buildings in New York City, burning 3,000 innocent Americans to death.”

Who exactly has been waging war on whom, he rightly asks?

And yet, he points out, there has been virtually no recorded incident of anti-Muslim violence in America itself (where there are many Muslims) since then.

By contrast, because of persecution by Muslim majorities, Christians have been leaving the Middle East in such great numbers that, for the first time since Christ, large parts of the region have become empty of both Jews and Christians.

And at the same time millions of Muslims have moved to the West, where they are free to practice their religion. And even in America there is more criticism of Christianity than of Islam.

Continuing his ‘speech’, Prager adds: “Unfortunately, in much of the Muslim world today, anti-Jewish speeches and writing are frequently identical to the genocidal anti-Semitism one heard and read in Nazi Germany. This is a blight on your civilisation. How can you seriously charge that America is at war with Islam when in fact much of the Islamic world is at war with Jews and Christians?”

He believes Americans would feel more confident of their relations with the Muslim world if they had ever seen a large demonstration of Muslims against all the terror committed in the name of Islam — whether in London, Madrid, New York, Bali, Cairo or Mumbai. The mark of a great civilisation, he said – and Arab civilisation was indeed once great – is a willingness to criticise itself.

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