Obama-Style Mutual Respect

June 15, 2015

Obama-Style Mutual Respect By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld

 

President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address has laid down the foundations to the chaos engulfing the Middle East. “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth….And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united.”

He then signaled “the Muslim world” with a promise to “seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

This was the opening salvo in the Obama administration’s bizarre attempt to deal with the longstanding animosity of the Muslim world toward the non-Muslim world and in particular to the United States.

Ayatollah Khomeini declared America as the “great Satan” in 1979, but Muslim irrational hostility toward the U.S. goes much further back. Nonetheless, for Obama, the way forward with Islam is by showing “mutual respect.”

To this day, Obama has not abandoned, in either rhetoric or action, the line that Islam is a religion of peace. Nor has he acknowledged Islamist terrorism. Islam is in no way the problem for him. For Obama, the Muslim world is eager and willing to recognize “mutual interest.”

Evidence to the contrary has been legion.

For example, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, served notice on Obama in March 2009 that “mutual interest” and “mutual respect” were not in the cards, saying this about Obama’s first presidential proposal to reach out to Iran diplomatically:

“Today, you are hated throughout the world. If you don’t know this, you should. The peoples burn your flag. The Islamic peoples all over the world chant: ‘Death to America!‘”

By February 2014, Khamenei was saying, “American officials publicly say they do not seek regime change in Iran. That’s a lie. They would not hesitate a moment if they could do it.”

Then in April 2015, Khamenei showed his view of mutual interest with the U.S. in saying “They created the myth of [Iranian] nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic Republic is a source of threat. No, the source of threat is America itself, with its unrestrained, destabilizing interventions.”

Khamenei’s disrespect of America is now widely shared by Muslim leaders across the Middle East and South Asia, and not just those of established, Islamist regimes and terror groups. Yet, after six years of pandering to Iran, only to be rebuffed, many of Obama’s supporters turn a blind eye and a deaf ear toward the growing Iranian and other Islamist/jihadist threats.

The consistency with which the Obama administration has held the line on the dubious tenets of the president’s first inaugural address was enforced by directives to government agencies to refrain from associating the word “terrorist” with “Muslim”, instead using “politically adjusted” vocabulary describing Islamic terrorists as “extremists” and “militants.” The media and academia followed suit with attempts to validate Obama’s false narrative. A good example is Simon Cotte’s recent article in the Atlantic, “It’s Nearly

Impossible to Understand What Motivates Terrorists.” According to Cotte, “Based on … a reading of the sources of terrorism and violence, scholars assert that the roots of Islamist terrorism lie not in Islam but in the historical crimes and injustices of Western and U.S.-driven imperialism, specifically the post-9/11 era events such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.“

But the glaring mishandling of the Arab Spring, ISIS, the greater Middle East, and the continuing pandering to Iran, not to mention six years of talking utopian nonsense and “leading from behind,” has been compounded by Obama’s unwillingness to acknowledge that secular Islam is fast disappearing. Together with the so-called “Liberals” he fails to admit/recognize that the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal, as is Iran’s and ISIS’s, is to impose Islamic law (shari’a) everywhere. The tactics may be less violent but the goal is the same. Failing to acknowledge this, Obama takes no responsibility for “common humanity” to stop the brutal killings and devastation in the Middle East.

“America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace,” said Obama in his 2009 Inaugural address. He went on to equate the world’s future with America’s overcoming its dark past, as if there were no difference between the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries and the medieval and authoritarian regimes of today’s world. This has been at the core of Obama’s “vision” and foreign policy plans. He announced his utopian perspective (some now say naďveté) opining that, “We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.”

No amount of evidence to the contrary—hundreds of thousands victims massacred and millions of people displaced—has done anything to dissuade him. And if this legacy were not enough, he is now ready to

legitimize the terrorist state of Iran and, as a bonus, bless its nuclear agenda. Does he think the Mullahs will then respect him?