Amazing how Rauf claimed that not building the Mosque would be a threat to national security--
Islam’s Encounters With America
A survey by Elaph, the most respected electronic daily in the Arab world, saw 58% object to the building of the WTC mosque.
OPINION SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
By FOUAD AJAMI
From his recent travels to the Persian Gulf—sponsored and paid for by the State Department—Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf returned with a none-too-subtle threat. His project, the Ground Zero Mosque, would have to go on. Its cancellation would risk putting “our soldiers, our troops, our embassies and citizens under attack in the Muslim world.”
Leave aside the attempt to make this project a matter of national security. The self-appointed bridge between America and the Arab-Islamic world is a false witness to the sentiments in Islamic lands.
The truth is that the trajectory of Islam in America (and Europe for that matter) is at variance with the play of things in Islam’s main habitat. A survey by Elaph, the most respected electronic daily in the Arab world, gave a decided edge to those who objected to the building of this mosque—58% saw it as a project of folly.
Elaph was at it again in the aftermath of Pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn copies of the Quran: It queried its readers as to whether America was a “tolerant” or a “bigoted” society. The split was 63% to 37% in favor of those who accepted the good faith and pluralism of this country.
This is remarkable. The ground burned in the Arab-Islamic world over the last three decades. Sly preachers and their foot soldiers “weaponized” the faith and all but devoured what modernists had tried to build in the face of difficult odds. The fury has not burned out. Self-styled imams continue to issue fatwas that have made it all but impossible for Arabs and Muslims to partake of the modern world. But from this ruinous history, there has settled upon countless Muslims and Arabs the recognition that the wells are poisoned in their midst, that the faith has to be reined in or that the faith will kill, and that the economic and cultural prospects of modern Islam hang in the balance.
To this kind of sobriety, Muslim activists and preachers in the diaspora—in Patterson, N.J., and Minneapolis, in Copenhagen and Amsterdam—appear to be largely indifferent. They are forever on the look-out for the smallest slight.
Islam in America is of recent vintage. This country can’t be “Islamic.” Its foundations are deep in the Puritan religious tradition. The waves of immigrants who came to these shores understood the need for discretion, and for patience.
It wasn't belligerence that carried the Catholics and the Jews into the great American mainstream. It was the swarm of daily life—the grocery store, the assembly line, the garment industry, the public schools, and the big wars that knit the American communities together—and tore down the religious and ethnic barriers.
There is no gain to be had, no hearts and minds to be won, in Imam Rauf insisting that Ground Zero can't be hallowed ground because there is a strip joint and an off-track betting office nearby. This may be true, but it is irrelevant.
A terrible deed took place on that ground nine years ago. Nineteen young Arabs brought death and ruin onto American soil, and discretion has a place of pride in the way the aftermath is handled. "Islam" didn't commit these crimes, but young Arabs and Muslims did.
There is no use for the incantation that Islam is a religion of peace. The incantation is false; Islam, like other religions, is theologically a religion of war and a religion of peace. In our time, it is a religion in distress, fought over, hijacked at times, by a militant breed at war with the modern world.
Again, from Elaph, here are the thoughts of an Arab writer, Ahmed Abu Mattar, who sees through the militancy of the religious radicals. He dismisses outright the anger over the "foolish and deranged" Pastor Terry Jones who threatened to burn copies of the Quran. "Where is the anger in the face of dictatorships which dominate the lives of Arabs from the cradle to the grave? Would the Prophet Muhammad look with favor on the prisons in our midst which outnumber the universities and hospitals? Would he take comfort in the rate of illiteracy among the Arabs which exceeds 60%? Would he be satisfied with the backwardness that renders us a burden on other nations?"
The first Arabs who came to America arrived during the time of the Great Migration (1880-1920). Their story is told by Gregory Orfalea in his book, "The Arab Americans: A History" (2006). The pioneers were mostly Christians on the run from the hunger and the privations of a dying Ottoman empire. One such pioneer who fled Lebanon for America said he wanted to leave his homeland and "go to the land of justice." Ellis Island was fondly named bayt al-hurriya (the house of freedom). It was New York, in the larger neighborhood of Wall Street, that was the first home of the immigrants.
Restrictive quotas and the Great Depression reduced the migration to a trickle. This would change drastically in the 1950s and '60s. The time of Islam in America had begun.
It was in 1965, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf tells us, that he made his way to America as a young man. He and a vast migration would be here as American identity would undergo a drastic metamorphosis.
The prudence of days past was now a distant memory. These activists who came in the 1990s—the time of multiculturalism and of what the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the "disuniting of America"—would insist on a full-scale revision of the American creed. American liberalism had broken with American patriotism, and the self-styled activists would give themselves over to a militancy that would have shocked their forerunners. It is out of that larger history that this project at Ground Zero is born.
There is a great Arab and Islamic tale. It happened in the early years of Islam, but it speaks to this controversy. It took place in A.D. 638, the time of Islam's triumphs.
The second successor to the Prophet, the Caliph Omar—to orthodox Muslims the most revered of the four Guided Caliphs for the great conquests that took place during his reign—had come to Jerusalem to accept the city's surrender. Patriarch Sophronius, the city's chief magistrate, is by his side for the ceremony of surrender. Prayer time comes for Omar while the patriarch is showing him the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The conqueror asks where he could spread out his prayer rug. Sophronius tells him that he could stay where he was. Omar refuses, because his followers, he said, might then claim for Islam the holy shrine of the Christians. Omar stepped outside for his prayer.
We don't always assert all the "rights" that we can get away with. The faith is honored when the faith bends to necessity and discretion.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
My thoughts on the Koran Burning Saga
In the South Park episode that aired a couple of years ago entitled "Cartoon Wars", Eric Cartman comes up with a devious plan to have the television show Family Guy taken off the air. When the Fox network considers pulling a Family Guy episode that features an inoffensive and completely benign image of Mohammad, the normally racist, sexist, divisive and at times unapologetically evil Cartman suddenly develops an overwhelming sense of respect for Islam and launches a personal crusade to have the Family Guy episode pulled. In the name of religious tolerance, Cartman highlights the violence that might ensue should Fox decide to air the episode uncensored. All of a sudden, Cartman magically transforms from neanderthal to neo progressive without missing a beat. The other main characters, especially Cartmans nemesis Kyle, are opposed to Cartmans hypersensitive moral mission at first, but are eventually duped into believing that Cartmans sudden epiphany of religious reverence and concern for the safety of others is legitimate.
Toward the end of the first part of "Cartoon Wars" Cartman inadvertently reveals his true intentions to Kyle. He doesn't care about Muslims, or the safety of Americans, or offending people-- he just wants a television show that he hates to be taken off the air (no arguments there, family guy sucks). Cartman's rationale is that once an episode is pulled, the show will eventually be cancelled. Once a TV network can be coerced or threatened into censoring a single episode, Pandora's box is irrerversably opened and the network can be intimidated into pulling or censoring any or all future episodes for any reason imaginable. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have a knack for delivering the most sane and coherent points of view on all relevant social and political issues currently taking place in this country with the acute marksmanship of a sniper. In the end, Kyle thwarts Cartmans attempt to have the episode of Family Guy showing Mohammad taken off of the air and life goes on. Kyle reminds everyone that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle that America was founded on and that it is either something to be treasured, valued and exercised without fear of violence or reprisal-- or it should be eliminated completely. Giving into fear allows the terrorists to win, and at the end of the day if we give in once, we might as well give up America. In a truly free society, either everything is fair game or nothing is.
I bring up South Park as a prelude to the Koran burning controversy for two reasons. In the first place, Parker and Stone were recently the targets of ridicule in the Muslim world for attempting to release an episode showing an image of Mohammad. As in Cartoon Wars, the image was totally inoffensive. However, Comedy Central pulled the episode amid threats of violence. What I find comical about this recent development is actually two fold. First, this is a classic example of life imitating art and vice versa. Second, ONLY MUSLIMS ARE FORBIDDEN TO SHOW IMAGES OF MOHAMMAD. The Koran says nothing about non-Muslims creating images of Mohammad (not that anyone bothered to pay attention; they were too busy hiding in a pool of their own urine). Apparently, most Muslims are illiterate or have never read the Koran.
Secondly, there is a clear parallel at work here that I can't imagine only struck me as an incredible revelation. If you wanted to diminish any strong entity, albeit a television network, publicly traded corporation or in this case the most powerful country on earth-- what would be the easiest and smartest way to go about it? Would you directly confront the giant and attempt to match its might? Of course not. You bring down a giant by destroying its mystique and by causing the supremely confident giant to question itself and lose faith in the armor of infallibility. This is not done through direct confrontation. The much smarter and easier thing to do is to attack the IDEA of the giant. If you can call into question the giants very reason for being, you can destroy the giant with a little bit of persistence and minimal effort. The giant, comfortable and complacent, is not used to any real engagement anyway, because in recent history it has had so little to fight for. So, when faced with a challenge to its authority and autonomy that has nothing to do with the things it easily wields in its control like leaves on a tree- Money, brute force, power, influence—the giant begins to panic. If the enemy can’t be bought or merely crushed like a bug, what then? Now the giant begins to cower—it can’t lose face because once in a position of weakness, others will rise to take the giants place. So what does the giant do? It abandons the idea that it is a giant and appeases the challenger to its supremacy in order to maintain the illusion of safety. All the while, the giant pats itself on the back for thwarting a potential parade of horribles—The What If scenarios abound in a smug exercise of self congratulatory delusion. The giant reassures itself that it has risen above its illogical enemy and that it has proven as much through a sacrificial exercise of benevolent self restraint. Victory has been achieved because the giant avoided conflict. Like a champion prizefighter who retains his belt because he avoids the defense of his title, the giant convinces himself that the balance of power is left undisturbed.
But what of the challenger? The challenger now becomes emboldened. Seeing that the giant has no stomach to fight and no will to maintain his superiority beyond superficial displays that demonstrate a monumental lack of courage and conviction, the challenger follows the same formula again. Agitate, threaten, demand and escalate tensions while asking for sympathy and understanding at the same time. The idea always remains the same, but the issue of contention being used to attack the giants’ spirit will change. Sure enough, the same predictable outcome is reached. Little by little, bit by bit the giant can’t see what is happening. By fighting not to lose instead of fighting to win, the giant is too far removed to see his reflection below. Too vain and short sided to risk being viewed as unpopular; the giant’s very survival is now threatened. What started off as a harmless appeasement to avoid a prolonged struggle against an unworthy and undignified adversary has now mushroomed into an all consuming cloud of doubt, cowardice and at long last, instability.
Symbolism and imagery aside, my little foray into cartoons and ideological combat is meant to bring the Koran burning drama into proper perspective. I personally do not think that burning books is an effective way to bring attention to the world’s greatest threat against all of secular and civilized society. However, Terry Jones has the right to burn as many Korans as he can get his hands on. It is his RIGHT to do so under the Constitution of the United States. He is free to decide how to express himself politically, religiously or otherwise and his followers are free to do the same. Cross burning is protected speech. Flag burning is protected speech. Pornography is protected speech. He is a private citizen with a congregation of about 50 families in a sparsely populated area of Florida. Quite frankly, I don’t care what he does or how he does it. When I first heard about his plan to burn Koran’s on 911, I was against it—not because I care one iota about offending Muslims, but because it seemed like an immature way to highlight a serious problem and that inevitably, the main stream media would ignore the message and instead focus on the means of delivering that message. But now, after the whole world has taken notice of this crackpot Preacher with next to no followers, I adamantly support his publicity stunt. I am absolutely incensed that the Obama administration has spoken out against this man. Now, we are going to let what Islamic fanatics might do dictate whether or not we exercise our constitutional rights?! This is madness and insanity on levels that I didn’t think I would ever live to see in my country. The underlying message being promoted via the garbage coming out of the Obama administrations mouth is simple—give up your rights when violent barbarians on the other side of the world say so and when threatened with violence, cower and comply with the demands of the violent barbarians in the name of tolerance. In the end, what happens? THE TERRORISTS WIN. First it was cartoons, now private citizens can’t engage in freedom of speech, next time, what will these animals demand of us and how fast should we throw the constitution in the garbage to meet their demands?
The Islamist terror movement is doing exactly what Eric Cartman did in the South Park episode “Cartoon Wars”. At the outset of the episode, Kyle was behaving like most American liberals do—deluded and brainwashed into believing that Cartman and by extension the global Islamic fundamentalist (and their propaganda wing in the Council of American Islamic Relations) movement is genuinely concerned about the Koran burnings because they fear for the safety of American soldiers and citizens and that efforts should be made to prevent the exercise of free speech in the name of tolerance. I am hoping that this country finally wakes up and is struck by a lightning bolt of awareness in the same fashion that Kyle does toward the end of “Cartoon Wars”. All of the evidence is in plain view. Hopefully, this unpleasant realization will be made without the prerequisite of a nationally televised confession from the figure heads of the Islamist movement. Because unlike the confession Cartman makes to Kyle in “Cartoon Wars” that reveals the truth with plenty of time left in the episode for Kyle to save the day, real life is never as scripted or merciful.
The devious minds at work behind the violent struggle to falsely portray Islam as a peaceful religion and to elevate Islam beyond the reach of our Constitution are gaining ground right now, every day, right in front of our eyes. Every inch we give them plunges America deeper and deeper into the opiates of complacency, self delusion and willful blindness. The foundational principles that this country was built upon should never waiver, accommodate or falter under any circumstances, for any person or persons or for any reason. America is an idea, the end result of a dream conjured up by great minds that agreed certain aspects of our lives are beyond government control. To dilute or compromise the basic aspects of American life because of the potential consequences destroys everything that this country stands for and relegates America to the same status as the tyrant regimes that hundreds of thousands of American lives have been sacrificed to defeat.
My final thought involves how the Ground Zero Mosque ties in with the Koran Burning controversy. Does anyone else find it infuriating and hypocritical that Obama and his staff of spineless chumps want freedom of speech to take a backseat to the demands of Islamist extremism because America doesn’t want to offend Muslims, yet the Ground Zero Mosque which is 100 times more offensive, outrageous and incendiary to AMERICANS than burning some pieces of paper is defended tooth and nail? I suppose that we should pay close attention to our Islamic brethren. They have figured out how to make the giant bend to its will. Perhaps some violent protesting, the murder of innocent people and some other acts of destruction and brutality will prompt the United States government to be concerned with ( WAIT FOR IT)-----GASPPPPPPP---- THE DEMANDS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Toward the end of the first part of "Cartoon Wars" Cartman inadvertently reveals his true intentions to Kyle. He doesn't care about Muslims, or the safety of Americans, or offending people-- he just wants a television show that he hates to be taken off the air (no arguments there, family guy sucks). Cartman's rationale is that once an episode is pulled, the show will eventually be cancelled. Once a TV network can be coerced or threatened into censoring a single episode, Pandora's box is irrerversably opened and the network can be intimidated into pulling or censoring any or all future episodes for any reason imaginable. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have a knack for delivering the most sane and coherent points of view on all relevant social and political issues currently taking place in this country with the acute marksmanship of a sniper. In the end, Kyle thwarts Cartmans attempt to have the episode of Family Guy showing Mohammad taken off of the air and life goes on. Kyle reminds everyone that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle that America was founded on and that it is either something to be treasured, valued and exercised without fear of violence or reprisal-- or it should be eliminated completely. Giving into fear allows the terrorists to win, and at the end of the day if we give in once, we might as well give up America. In a truly free society, either everything is fair game or nothing is.
I bring up South Park as a prelude to the Koran burning controversy for two reasons. In the first place, Parker and Stone were recently the targets of ridicule in the Muslim world for attempting to release an episode showing an image of Mohammad. As in Cartoon Wars, the image was totally inoffensive. However, Comedy Central pulled the episode amid threats of violence. What I find comical about this recent development is actually two fold. First, this is a classic example of life imitating art and vice versa. Second, ONLY MUSLIMS ARE FORBIDDEN TO SHOW IMAGES OF MOHAMMAD. The Koran says nothing about non-Muslims creating images of Mohammad (not that anyone bothered to pay attention; they were too busy hiding in a pool of their own urine). Apparently, most Muslims are illiterate or have never read the Koran.
Secondly, there is a clear parallel at work here that I can't imagine only struck me as an incredible revelation. If you wanted to diminish any strong entity, albeit a television network, publicly traded corporation or in this case the most powerful country on earth-- what would be the easiest and smartest way to go about it? Would you directly confront the giant and attempt to match its might? Of course not. You bring down a giant by destroying its mystique and by causing the supremely confident giant to question itself and lose faith in the armor of infallibility. This is not done through direct confrontation. The much smarter and easier thing to do is to attack the IDEA of the giant. If you can call into question the giants very reason for being, you can destroy the giant with a little bit of persistence and minimal effort. The giant, comfortable and complacent, is not used to any real engagement anyway, because in recent history it has had so little to fight for. So, when faced with a challenge to its authority and autonomy that has nothing to do with the things it easily wields in its control like leaves on a tree- Money, brute force, power, influence—the giant begins to panic. If the enemy can’t be bought or merely crushed like a bug, what then? Now the giant begins to cower—it can’t lose face because once in a position of weakness, others will rise to take the giants place. So what does the giant do? It abandons the idea that it is a giant and appeases the challenger to its supremacy in order to maintain the illusion of safety. All the while, the giant pats itself on the back for thwarting a potential parade of horribles—The What If scenarios abound in a smug exercise of self congratulatory delusion. The giant reassures itself that it has risen above its illogical enemy and that it has proven as much through a sacrificial exercise of benevolent self restraint. Victory has been achieved because the giant avoided conflict. Like a champion prizefighter who retains his belt because he avoids the defense of his title, the giant convinces himself that the balance of power is left undisturbed.
But what of the challenger? The challenger now becomes emboldened. Seeing that the giant has no stomach to fight and no will to maintain his superiority beyond superficial displays that demonstrate a monumental lack of courage and conviction, the challenger follows the same formula again. Agitate, threaten, demand and escalate tensions while asking for sympathy and understanding at the same time. The idea always remains the same, but the issue of contention being used to attack the giants’ spirit will change. Sure enough, the same predictable outcome is reached. Little by little, bit by bit the giant can’t see what is happening. By fighting not to lose instead of fighting to win, the giant is too far removed to see his reflection below. Too vain and short sided to risk being viewed as unpopular; the giant’s very survival is now threatened. What started off as a harmless appeasement to avoid a prolonged struggle against an unworthy and undignified adversary has now mushroomed into an all consuming cloud of doubt, cowardice and at long last, instability.
Symbolism and imagery aside, my little foray into cartoons and ideological combat is meant to bring the Koran burning drama into proper perspective. I personally do not think that burning books is an effective way to bring attention to the world’s greatest threat against all of secular and civilized society. However, Terry Jones has the right to burn as many Korans as he can get his hands on. It is his RIGHT to do so under the Constitution of the United States. He is free to decide how to express himself politically, religiously or otherwise and his followers are free to do the same. Cross burning is protected speech. Flag burning is protected speech. Pornography is protected speech. He is a private citizen with a congregation of about 50 families in a sparsely populated area of Florida. Quite frankly, I don’t care what he does or how he does it. When I first heard about his plan to burn Koran’s on 911, I was against it—not because I care one iota about offending Muslims, but because it seemed like an immature way to highlight a serious problem and that inevitably, the main stream media would ignore the message and instead focus on the means of delivering that message. But now, after the whole world has taken notice of this crackpot Preacher with next to no followers, I adamantly support his publicity stunt. I am absolutely incensed that the Obama administration has spoken out against this man. Now, we are going to let what Islamic fanatics might do dictate whether or not we exercise our constitutional rights?! This is madness and insanity on levels that I didn’t think I would ever live to see in my country. The underlying message being promoted via the garbage coming out of the Obama administrations mouth is simple—give up your rights when violent barbarians on the other side of the world say so and when threatened with violence, cower and comply with the demands of the violent barbarians in the name of tolerance. In the end, what happens? THE TERRORISTS WIN. First it was cartoons, now private citizens can’t engage in freedom of speech, next time, what will these animals demand of us and how fast should we throw the constitution in the garbage to meet their demands?
The Islamist terror movement is doing exactly what Eric Cartman did in the South Park episode “Cartoon Wars”. At the outset of the episode, Kyle was behaving like most American liberals do—deluded and brainwashed into believing that Cartman and by extension the global Islamic fundamentalist (and their propaganda wing in the Council of American Islamic Relations) movement is genuinely concerned about the Koran burnings because they fear for the safety of American soldiers and citizens and that efforts should be made to prevent the exercise of free speech in the name of tolerance. I am hoping that this country finally wakes up and is struck by a lightning bolt of awareness in the same fashion that Kyle does toward the end of “Cartoon Wars”. All of the evidence is in plain view. Hopefully, this unpleasant realization will be made without the prerequisite of a nationally televised confession from the figure heads of the Islamist movement. Because unlike the confession Cartman makes to Kyle in “Cartoon Wars” that reveals the truth with plenty of time left in the episode for Kyle to save the day, real life is never as scripted or merciful.
The devious minds at work behind the violent struggle to falsely portray Islam as a peaceful religion and to elevate Islam beyond the reach of our Constitution are gaining ground right now, every day, right in front of our eyes. Every inch we give them plunges America deeper and deeper into the opiates of complacency, self delusion and willful blindness. The foundational principles that this country was built upon should never waiver, accommodate or falter under any circumstances, for any person or persons or for any reason. America is an idea, the end result of a dream conjured up by great minds that agreed certain aspects of our lives are beyond government control. To dilute or compromise the basic aspects of American life because of the potential consequences destroys everything that this country stands for and relegates America to the same status as the tyrant regimes that hundreds of thousands of American lives have been sacrificed to defeat.
My final thought involves how the Ground Zero Mosque ties in with the Koran Burning controversy. Does anyone else find it infuriating and hypocritical that Obama and his staff of spineless chumps want freedom of speech to take a backseat to the demands of Islamist extremism because America doesn’t want to offend Muslims, yet the Ground Zero Mosque which is 100 times more offensive, outrageous and incendiary to AMERICANS than burning some pieces of paper is defended tooth and nail? I suppose that we should pay close attention to our Islamic brethren. They have figured out how to make the giant bend to its will. Perhaps some violent protesting, the murder of innocent people and some other acts of destruction and brutality will prompt the United States government to be concerned with ( WAIT FOR IT)-----GASPPPPPPP---- THE DEMANDS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Another perfect article during the golden age of Conservative Op-ed's
Starting to say 'no'
Demanding truly moderate Islam
By ANDREW C. McCARTHY
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/starting_to_say_no_hUz9VY1Py5KvOgrU36plDL/0#ixzz0z45w6YFQ
A Tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.
Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as "moderate Islam" resulted in one's banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the "mainstream," by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions.
You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies -- no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.
The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.
It should never have gotten this far. Sponsors of the Ground Zero mosque neither own the property in question nor possess the means to build and operate the palatial Islamic center they envision. The more light that shines on their record of murky real-estate dealings and the dubious circumstances of their limited stake in the Ground Zero property, the more questions arise.
In a more sensible world, those questions would get answered before we plunged into a rancorous public debate. That hasn't happened, though. In spite of the implacable determination of the mayor (and the attorney general who would be governor) to look the other way, the issue has galvanized the public. What has long bubbled beneath the surface did not need much more heat to boil over.
For the better part of two decades, Americans have been murdered by Islamists and then lectured that they are to blame for what has befallen them. We have been instructed in the need for special sensitivity to the unceasing demands of Islamic culture and falsely accused of intolerance by the people who wrote the book on intolerance.
Americans have sacrificed blood and bottomless treasure for Islamic peoples who despise Americans -- and despise us even more as our sacrifices and gestures of self-loathing intensify. Americans have watched as apologists for terrorists and sha ria were made the face of an American Muslim community that we were simultaneously assured was the very picture of pro-American moderation.
Americans have had our fill. We are willing to live many lies. This one, though, strikes too close to home, arousing our heretofore dormant sense of decency. Americans have now heard President Obama's shtick enough times to know that when he talks about "our values," he's really talking about his values, which most of us don't share. And after 10 years of the Council on American-Islamic Relations's tired tirades, we're immune to Feisal Rauf, too.
We look around us and we see our country unrivaled by anything in the history of human tolerance. We see thousands of thriving mosques, permitted to operate freely even though we know for a fact that mosques have been used against us, repeatedly, to urge terrorism, recruit terrorists, raise money for terrorists, store and transfer firearms, and inflame Muslims against America and the West.
As Islamists rage against us, we see Islam celebrated in official Washington. As we reach out for the umpty-umpth time, we find Muslim leaders taking what we offer, but always with complaint and never with reciprocation.
We're weary, and we don't really care if that means that Timemagazine, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, Fareed Zakaria and the rest think we're bad people -- they think we're bad people anyway. So finally we're asking: Where is this "moderate Islam" you've been telling us about?
Why would a self-proclaimed bridge-builder insist on something so patently provocative and divisive? How can we be sure that if imam Rauf builds his monument on our graveyard, it won't become what other purportedly "moderate" Islamic centers have become: a cauldron of anti-American vitriol?
It turns out that there are no satisfactory answers. When finally pressed on the taxonomy of moderate Islam, the best our elites can do -- besides shouting "Islamophobia!" -- is debate whether there ever was a "golden age" of Islamic tolerance. They have to confess that the Islamists -- whom they'd like us to see as a handful of "extremists" but who are in truth a mass movement -- are in the ascendancy.
It is embarrassingly obvious that while some of us have been working to defeat Islamism in our midst, our elites are of the incorrigibly progressive mindset that counsels accommodating them -- in the delusion that they will be appeased rather than encouraged to become more aggressive.
That is precisely the mindset that makes an Islamist think: Maybe now is the time for a $100 million mosque at Ground Zero.
"Moderate Islam" is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential -- because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate.
But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.
The reformers' slim chance at prevailing hinges on the American people's will to say "no" to our self-anointed betters. Ground Zero, once again the site of epic Islamist overreach, may be remembered as the place where we started to say "no."
Andrew C. McCarthy is a Na tional Review Institute senior fellow. His latest book is "The Grand Jihad." From nationalreview.com
Demanding truly moderate Islam
By ANDREW C. McCARTHY
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/starting_to_say_no_hUz9VY1Py5KvOgrU36plDL/0#ixzz0z45w6YFQ
A Tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.
Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as "moderate Islam" resulted in one's banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the "mainstream," by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions.
You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies -- no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.
The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.
It should never have gotten this far. Sponsors of the Ground Zero mosque neither own the property in question nor possess the means to build and operate the palatial Islamic center they envision. The more light that shines on their record of murky real-estate dealings and the dubious circumstances of their limited stake in the Ground Zero property, the more questions arise.
In a more sensible world, those questions would get answered before we plunged into a rancorous public debate. That hasn't happened, though. In spite of the implacable determination of the mayor (and the attorney general who would be governor) to look the other way, the issue has galvanized the public. What has long bubbled beneath the surface did not need much more heat to boil over.
For the better part of two decades, Americans have been murdered by Islamists and then lectured that they are to blame for what has befallen them. We have been instructed in the need for special sensitivity to the unceasing demands of Islamic culture and falsely accused of intolerance by the people who wrote the book on intolerance.
Americans have sacrificed blood and bottomless treasure for Islamic peoples who despise Americans -- and despise us even more as our sacrifices and gestures of self-loathing intensify. Americans have watched as apologists for terrorists and sha ria were made the face of an American Muslim community that we were simultaneously assured was the very picture of pro-American moderation.
Americans have had our fill. We are willing to live many lies. This one, though, strikes too close to home, arousing our heretofore dormant sense of decency. Americans have now heard President Obama's shtick enough times to know that when he talks about "our values," he's really talking about his values, which most of us don't share. And after 10 years of the Council on American-Islamic Relations's tired tirades, we're immune to Feisal Rauf, too.
We look around us and we see our country unrivaled by anything in the history of human tolerance. We see thousands of thriving mosques, permitted to operate freely even though we know for a fact that mosques have been used against us, repeatedly, to urge terrorism, recruit terrorists, raise money for terrorists, store and transfer firearms, and inflame Muslims against America and the West.
As Islamists rage against us, we see Islam celebrated in official Washington. As we reach out for the umpty-umpth time, we find Muslim leaders taking what we offer, but always with complaint and never with reciprocation.
We're weary, and we don't really care if that means that Timemagazine, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, Fareed Zakaria and the rest think we're bad people -- they think we're bad people anyway. So finally we're asking: Where is this "moderate Islam" you've been telling us about?
Why would a self-proclaimed bridge-builder insist on something so patently provocative and divisive? How can we be sure that if imam Rauf builds his monument on our graveyard, it won't become what other purportedly "moderate" Islamic centers have become: a cauldron of anti-American vitriol?
It turns out that there are no satisfactory answers. When finally pressed on the taxonomy of moderate Islam, the best our elites can do -- besides shouting "Islamophobia!" -- is debate whether there ever was a "golden age" of Islamic tolerance. They have to confess that the Islamists -- whom they'd like us to see as a handful of "extremists" but who are in truth a mass movement -- are in the ascendancy.
It is embarrassingly obvious that while some of us have been working to defeat Islamism in our midst, our elites are of the incorrigibly progressive mindset that counsels accommodating them -- in the delusion that they will be appeased rather than encouraged to become more aggressive.
That is precisely the mindset that makes an Islamist think: Maybe now is the time for a $100 million mosque at Ground Zero.
"Moderate Islam" is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential -- because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate.
But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.
The reformers' slim chance at prevailing hinges on the American people's will to say "no" to our self-anointed betters. Ground Zero, once again the site of epic Islamist overreach, may be remembered as the place where we started to say "no."
Andrew C. McCarthy is a Na tional Review Institute senior fellow. His latest book is "The Grand Jihad." From nationalreview.com
Dinesh D'Souza makes a brutally shocking insight into the barking Commander and Chief
The best thing about the left falling apart is that there has been what I consider to be a rennisance by conservative columnists. D'Souza has always been a favorite of mine, but he has flown largely under the radar lately except on matters of religion. Here is a terrific article he penned recently about Barack Obama Sr. which may open some eyes and drop some jaws in the process.
Thank you to 33386 from getbig for posting this originally.
On The Cover/Top Stories
How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza, 09.7.10, 12:00 AM ET
www.forbes.com
________________________ _______________________
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?
The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.
Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.
A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?
It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.
Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.
What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.
So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.
If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.
Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.
Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."
But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.
Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."
In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.
But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.
Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).
Thank you to 33386 from getbig for posting this originally.
On The Cover/Top Stories
How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza, 09.7.10, 12:00 AM ET
www.forbes.com
________________________ _______________________
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?
The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.
Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.
A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?
It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.
Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.
What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.
So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
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Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.
If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.
Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.
Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."
But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.
Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."
In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
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Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.
But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.
Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).
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