Brilliant analysis from Mark Steyn:
By now you may be saying, "Oh, 'violent extremism', I get it. You mean..." Whoa, don't go there, girlfriend. "This is not true Islam," insists President Obama.
Roger Kimball observes:
"ISIL is not 'Islamic.'" Really? Was the Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic?" How about Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan: is he "Islamic"? A few years ago, Erdogan told the world that the phrase "moderate Islam" is "ugly" because "Islam is Islam." Democracy, he said, is just an express stop on the train whose destination is Islam...
The Saudis, the biggest and richest Sunni nation? They torture bloggers for "insulting Islam," stone adulteresses, maim thieves, and treat women like chattel. Do they represent Islam?
But Obama has ambitions way beyond the Turks and Saudis. If the Islamic State isn't "true Islam", is the Taliban, our "partners for peace" in Aghanistan? Is "true Islam" the Iranian mullahs, our "partners for peace" in the Persian Gulf and beyond? How about the Houthi? They're our Iranian partners for peace's partners for peace in Yemen, and they were awfully sporting to let our diplomats flee without beheading them.
"Violent extremism" may have nothing to do with Islam, yet Obama's summit on "violent extremism" was oddly preoccupied with Islam, to the extent of according it a special deference:
A Muslim prayer was recited at the start of the second day of the White House summit on "Countering Violent Extremism," but no other religious text was presented during the portion of the event that was open to the press.
Imam Sheikh Sa'ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, Minn., recited a "verse from the Quran" following remarks by Obama administration officials and Democratic members of Congress.
But hey, what's so odd about that? "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to "the fabric of our country" for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody's fabric but instead tends to unravel it - as it's doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.
But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with "violent extremists" is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don't mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:
We in the administration and the government should give voice to the plight of Muslims living in this country and the discrimination that they face. And so I personally have committed to speak out about the situation that very often people in the Muslim community in this country face. The fact that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the Islamic faith is one about peace and brotherhood.
I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security on the basic Thatcherite principle that if you create a government bureaucracy in order to deal with a problem you'll never be rid of the problem. But I underestimated the creativity of our rulers: The DHS was set up because 19 Muslims flew planes into skyscrapers and killed thousands of people. Thirteen years later, the head of the DHS thinks his department's priority should be to "give voice to the plight of Muslims" who have the misfortune to live in America.
How about "the plight of Muslims" who live in Muslim countries? As I wrote in 2006 in the very prologue of the highly prescient America Alone:
In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House's survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest "freedom" score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France's fortunes as a fourth member of that group.
The "plight" of Muslim communities in America and the west is that they enjoy freedoms they could never dream of back in Somalia or Syria or anywhere else - but that they value those freedoms less than they value the pre-eminence of Islam.
By now you may be saying, "Oh, 'violent extremism', I get it. You mean..." Whoa, don't go there, girlfriend. "This is not true Islam," insists President Obama.
Roger Kimball observes:
"ISIL is not 'Islamic.'" Really? Was the Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic?" How about Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan: is he "Islamic"? A few years ago, Erdogan told the world that the phrase "moderate Islam" is "ugly" because "Islam is Islam." Democracy, he said, is just an express stop on the train whose destination is Islam...
The Saudis, the biggest and richest Sunni nation? They torture bloggers for "insulting Islam," stone adulteresses, maim thieves, and treat women like chattel. Do they represent Islam?
But Obama has ambitions way beyond the Turks and Saudis. If the Islamic State isn't "true Islam", is the Taliban, our "partners for peace" in Aghanistan? Is "true Islam" the Iranian mullahs, our "partners for peace" in the Persian Gulf and beyond? How about the Houthi? They're our Iranian partners for peace's partners for peace in Yemen, and they were awfully sporting to let our diplomats flee without beheading them.
"Violent extremism" may have nothing to do with Islam, yet Obama's summit on "violent extremism" was oddly preoccupied with Islam, to the extent of according it a special deference:
A Muslim prayer was recited at the start of the second day of the White House summit on "Countering Violent Extremism," but no other religious text was presented during the portion of the event that was open to the press.
Imam Sheikh Sa'ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, Minn., recited a "verse from the Quran" following remarks by Obama administration officials and Democratic members of Congress.
But hey, what's so odd about that? "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to "the fabric of our country" for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody's fabric but instead tends to unravel it - as it's doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.
But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with "violent extremists" is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don't mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:
We in the administration and the government should give voice to the plight of Muslims living in this country and the discrimination that they face. And so I personally have committed to speak out about the situation that very often people in the Muslim community in this country face. The fact that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the Islamic faith is one about peace and brotherhood.
I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security on the basic Thatcherite principle that if you create a government bureaucracy in order to deal with a problem you'll never be rid of the problem. But I underestimated the creativity of our rulers: The DHS was set up because 19 Muslims flew planes into skyscrapers and killed thousands of people. Thirteen years later, the head of the DHS thinks his department's priority should be to "give voice to the plight of Muslims" who have the misfortune to live in America.
How about "the plight of Muslims" who live in Muslim countries? As I wrote in 2006 in the very prologue of the highly prescient America Alone:
In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House's survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest "freedom" score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France's fortunes as a fourth member of that group.
The "plight" of Muslim communities in America and the west is that they enjoy freedoms they could never dream of back in Somalia or Syria or anywhere else - but that they value those freedoms less than they value the pre-eminence of Islam.
