The Obama Administration, Islam, and Other Things

Earlier, Uncle Cephas went on record against deliberate Qur'an burnings (http://unclecephas.blogspot.com/2010/09/lost-teaching-opportunity.html) as well as against Islamic triumphalism. He has not changed his opinion. But now that there have been riots in Afghanistan over inadvertent burnings of defaced Qur'ans by American military personnel and that the perpetrators of the burning may be put on trial, it's time to re-examine the question of Obama's relationship to the Islamic faith, his commitment to American valaues, and general qualifications to be president.

No, Barak Obama is not a Muslim, save in the eyes of Sharia, which holds any child of a Muslim father is a born Muslim. Nor is Obama a non-citizen by birth. Even if, as his senile grandmother affirmed, he was born in Mombassa Kenya, there is no evidence that his mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, was anything other than an American citizen with the legal qualifications to transmit citizenship to offspring born abroad. This is one reason why Obama's Indonesian-born half-sister entered the USA on an American passport rather than on an immigrant visa. But, for the record, Uncle Cephas accepst that our current President was born in Hawaii rather than Kenya.

The big problem is that Barack Obama and the administration he leads are sacrificing the protection of their own country and its values to gain the good opinion of people who will never have a good opinion of the USA.

No administration spokesman seems to have made a point of observing that the burnt Qur'ans originally had been used by incarcerated terrorists to pass messages concerning escape plots, and probably the killings of Afghans as well as NATO forces. In Sunni Islam, the marking or writing in the Qur'an is an act of blasphemy. Yet none of the ire of the Afghan street seems to fall on the original defacers. Nor has anyone bothered to note that the Afghan riots have killed far more Afghans than foreigners. Rather, all is focused on retraining and possibly disciplining Americans who were going about their legally mandated military duties.

This is similar to the administration's failure to take a teaching moment to explain the First Amendment in the wake of Terry Jones' ill-advised public burning of the Qur'an. The uppermost concern is to placate the volatile opinion of enemies rather than speak up for the values and Constitution which administration members are sworn to uphold.

As for religious affiliation, Obama's religion seems to be political expediency. He was a devout member of the United Church of Christ for as long as it could help him in the world of South Chicago politics. But, before the Organization of Islamic Countries in Cairo, he repeats the "Peace Be Upon Him" mantra at the mention of Jesus, as if Jesus is just a dead man, rather than the Risen One of whom we must ask peace.

Obama does not "get" the importance of theological doctrine in either Christian or Muslim discourse. It is among the large lacunae in his and his administration's intellectual furniture, and matched only by the firmness of his and his minions' belief in their belonging to the true cognoscenti.

So far, the Obama administration's attempt to win the goodwill of the Islamic world has borne no fruit. Iraq is in the process of sliding towards either sectarian civil war or becoming a new satrapy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The USA has made no headway in winning Afghan hearts and minds, and in that conflict, remains heavily dependent on that miasma of Islamic bigotry, injustice, corruption, and treachery called Pakistan. The "Arab Spring" towards which the Obama showed so much goodwill is showing itself a fountain of greater Islamic bigotry, the brunt of which is being borne by the Coptic Christians of Egypt and the small, dwindling Jewish community of Tunisia. Even the OIC's chair Isahnoglu (who as a Turk should know a lot better) has gone on record as saying that the Qur'an burning is an act of deliberate malice by the American government. Perhaps a moment of lucidity in this administration is appearing in Secretary Clinton's cautioning against arming the Syrian opposition. But this is a late awakening after interventions in Libya and connivance in Mubarak's fall.

Finally, the Obama administration has probed the cultural and legal fence around the First Amendment by first floating the idea that all physicians should be trained in abortion procedures regardless of conscience, and more recently that religious employers must purchase contraceptive coverage for their employees. Here, the president shows himself part of an anti-Christian secular liberal culture gone to seed. Seeing traditional Christianity of any sort as "the" theocratic danger, it will subvert the First Amendment to weaken it.

So, with obsequiousness towards enemies and cunning plots against friends, Obama's America lurches towards becoming ludicrous, as well as corrupt.

Blood for Fifteen Minutes of Fame

The Wikileaks are out, and now the American public knows that American allies in Afghanistan have a corrupt, incompetent, and none-too-trustowrthy regime. Why, it's even said that a senior police official in Afghanistan is actually an Iranian spy.

I was never much of a fan of going into Afghanistan. It would have been far better to wait until Osama Bin Ladin decided he wanted to crow about bringing down the Twin Towers and the front of the Pentagon, let him get on an airplane, and then send in fighters to grab him the way the Achille Lauro hijackers were grabbed. Afghanistan is one of the dark places of the earth, where there is little save rocks, poverty, and extremely bigoted Islam which, within not-to-distant historical memory prided itself on closing down the ancient Syriac Christian communities that once made the country home, and now, within living memory, have liquidated a Jewish community that has existed since before the book of Esther was written.

But I hope that if the authorities catch the real perpetrator of the leaks and convict him in court, they have the good sense to hang him.

One important group that has been "outed" in the leaks is a large number of people who have provided America and its allies with information on the movements of key Qaida and Taliban actors. These were people who thought we offered something better to their country (such as the right to educate one's daughters and listen to music), and trusted us enough to give us real help. And, before Michael Moore starts tarring such people as the equivalents of the Vichy and Quisling collaborators of World War II, let us remember that the people outed were those who were helping us hunt down some criminals who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11. It is now almost certain that these outed Afghans and Pakistanis will probably be butchered by their pro-Taliban neighbors, whose "Religion of Peace" thinks that if a neighboring Christian or Hindu girl is pretty, she is fair game to be kidnapped, raped, forcibly converted to Islam, and married off to her abductor.

Congratulations, Mr. Leaker. You've signed the death warrants for hundreds, if not thousands, who saw 9/11 as a crime, and were helping us bring its perpetrators to justice. And for this, you've gotten your fifteen minutes of fame.