DANIEL PIPES Barack Obama’s mention of “7 million American Muslims” in the course of his rambling and complex 6,000-word
address to the Muslim world from Cairo symbolizes the whole message.
Study after
study has found that demographic figure about three times too high. But Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America relentlessly promote the notion of 7 or even 10 million American Muslims. Obama’s accepting their version amounts to a giveaway, a cheap way to win the approbation of Islamists who so widely influence Muslim opinion.
“Giveaway,” indeed, defines the whole speech — inexpensive nods, tips of the hat, and salutations to win Muslim favor without initiating new approaches or embarking on new policies. The speech confirms Obama’s personal efforts (note how, in keeping with his past practice, he uses
the word “respect” ten times in this speech) as well as the established practice of American political leaders to
promote Islam, tell Muslims
what their religion really means, avoid
references to radical Islam, and excoriate violent Islamism while
accepting the non-violent variety.
On other issues too — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Arab-Israeli conflict, democracy — Obama reiterated his known policies.
In brief, he broke little new ground but raised to new heights the art of sugaring words in ways appealing to Islamists.
— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
GABRIEL SCHOENFELD If I put myself inside the mind of a typical Egyptian, or a typical Muslim listener — and I readily grant that I am likely to be off base in my conception of how such a listener thinks — I would regard the speech, and the man delivering it, as a remarkable spectacle, a demonstration that there is a different, more inviting, more intelligent, more sympathetic, better America than the one with which Middle Easterners are relentlessly confronted in images and voices carried across the region by
Al Jazeera and a virulently anti-American, anti-Western mass media. In other words, the speech achieved the president’s central objective handsomely.
That said, calling on Hamas to put an end to violence and to recognize Israel’s right to exist is either disingenuous or naïve. This incomprehension of the political, religious, and psychological mentality of that terrorist movement — and presumably the same incomprehension extends to the motive force behind other terrorist movements and other pathological forces in the region — augurs ill for a resolution of the Israel–Arab conflict on which the president has now staked the prestige of his office. One does not have to be a student of Aesop to know that begging a wolf to act like a lamb is a good way to get eaten alive.
— Gabriel Schoenfeld is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
AMIR TAHERI The speech could do a lot of harm. Obama endorsed the basic claim of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and Ali Khamenehi, who divide the world into Dar al-Islam (House of Peace) and Dar al-Harb (House of War).
By abandoning Bush’s Freedom Agenda, Obama could encourage despots whose brutal role has given radical Islamists, acting as opponents of the established order, a certain legitimacy.
Obama’s position on women in Islam was pathetic. And he made no mention of the tens of thousands of trade unionists, journalists, and women’s- and human-rights activists languishing in prison in most of the 57 countries with Muslim majorities. By promising to promote aspects of Islamic sharia, such as the payment of zakat, and the use of “hijab” by women, in the U.S. itself, Obama undermines the position of those Muslims who oppose the sharia in Muslim-majority countries.
Also, Obama committed the U.S. to supporting the Saudi initiative known as Interfaith Dialogue and the so-called Alliance of Civilizations, a Turkish-Spanish joint venture. The issue has never been debated in the U.S. Americans should know that both initiatives present religion as a legitimate vehicle for politics, something that American political tradition has shunned, at least so far.
A speech is no substitute for policy. Obama has no Middle East policy, a fact certain to be exposed before long. He has no policy because he lacks the big idea around which policy is made.
In the Middle East today, those who fight for democracy and human rights are unhappy.
— Amir Taheri is an Iranian-born journalist based in Europe, and author of The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution.
BAT YE’OR
Pres. Barack Obama was elected, by an overwhelming majority, on a program in which America’s rapprochement with Islam stands pre-eminent. This is a legitimate political aim in the quest for world peace. The questions are: how to achieve it, and why there is no reciprocal effort from the Muslim world represented by the Organization of the Islamic World (OIC). This body could express its regrets for over a millennium of jihad wars, land expropriations, enslavements, and humiliations of the conquered non-Muslim populations on three continents.
Obama’s Cairo discourse fits perfectly into his agenda. It flatters Muslim sensibilities and expresses the Muslim view of historical tolerance and cultural superiority over infidel civilizations. When Obama mentioned the “Isra” event, he referred to Muhammad’s ascension to heaven and his return in one night on a winged mule named Buraq. There he greets two Muslim prophets, Moses and Jesus/Isa, who are not the biblical figures. The image used here by the American president as a symbolic interfaith reconciliation between the three faiths is a meeting between three Muslim prophets and not the figureheads of the three monotheistic religions. Besides, the Isra event is not recognised by non-Muslims, and it didn’t happen in Jerusalem, as this name does not appear once in the Koran.
The president’s speech is similar to many such declarations by European leaders. The question it raises is how much the West is ready to forgo truth and its basic principles in its supplication for obtaining peace with Islam. Clearly, the full Islamization of the West is the quickest way to obtain it. Obama’s political program in connection with the Alliance of Civilizations conforms to an OIC strategy that has already been accepted by the EU. In history, this policy has a name: the dhimmitude syndrome.
— Bat Ye’or’s latest book was published in Italy: Verso il Califfato Universale, Come l’Europa è diventata complice dell’espansionismo musulmano, Lindau, Torino: May 2009. (Toward the Universal Caliphate: How Europe Became an Accomplice of Muslim Expansionism.)
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