Clueless One Trick Donkey

Speeches, more speeches. We have a one trick pony donkey in our midst. Yawn!

On a superficial level it all sounds good, doesn’t it? He is reaching out to the Muslim world. What a nice guy! This may just be the new beginning we all have been waiting for.

In Axelrod’s words, “There’s been a breach, an undeniable breach between America and the Islamic world, and that breach has been years in the making and it’s not going to be reversed with one speech or perhaps in one administration.” Oh, don’t we like these introspective, intellectually honest liberals accept so much blame for all the “ills” America has perpetrated over decades on this so called Muslim world. Of course, it does not matter whether such a logical entity as a cohesive “Muslim World” exists or not, as Scott Carpenter and Soner Cagaptay ask rhetorically in their insightful essay, What Muslim World?. As long as it serves the purpose of self-glorification and self-preservation for Obama, everything is fair game, even illogical and non-existent premises.

To me a head of state dissing his own country in front of the world is like disowning ones parents. It’s not done. He could distance himself from the policies of the previous administration; he could correct the course by implementing new policies negating the ill effects of the policies from the previous administration; he could hold critical players, national and international, to account. But Obama is doing none of that. In a bizarre fashion he is going around speechifying that he and the US have to win the hearts and minds of people on the street in the Muslim world. In one ridiculous instance, he is even lecturing the modern world that they should allow the women, Muslim women, to wear the Hijab (See Susan’s post on Peter Dauo’s article: “Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama’s Cairo Speech“, the title says it all.) Forget about the freedoms to realize all their god given potential but let them have their Hijabs.

If he wants to win the hearts and minds of people on the street in Cairo and other Muslim enclaves, why not try lecturing their oppressive governments to reform. Take for example, Saudi Arabia.

This is what he does when he meets the Saudi King (remember this?):

That one gesture is rife with such symbolism, you can write a book on it.

But this is what they do:

From Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in his Foreign Policy Essay:

King Abdullah’s alliance with the United States, combined with his oil wealth, has allowed his radical breed of Islam, Wahhabism, to flourish, poisoning the Middle East. With so much at stake, is it irrational to yearn for a world in which the Saudi regime just miraculously ceased to exist and there was no King Abdullah to bow to (or not) at all?

[snip]

Years after the September 11 attacks, the kingdom is still a center of ideological indoctrination, incitement, and terrorist financing. “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,” Stuart Levey, U.S. Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told ABC News in 2007. Thanks to the kingdom’s policies, countless young boys are brainwashed to hate Christians, Jews, and other “infidels” in Saudi-funded madrasas from Bangladesh, to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Spain, and even in the United States. Pakistan, perhaps of the most concern, has some 12,000 madrasas, many of which are Saudi-funded. Wahhabism provides not only the breeding ground on which Islamist terrorism flourishes, but it also threatens to overshadow other, more moderate traditions within Islam. As Lawrence Wright described in The Looming Tower, with a little over 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population, the Saudi Wahhabis support 90 percent of the entire faith’s expenses, radicalizing many bastions of moderate Islam beyond recognition.

Despite all that, because of the kingdom’s chokehold over the global economy, Washington has had to accept its abysmal human rights record, its treatment of women and non-Muslims as second-class citizens, its brutal attitude toward gays, and its financial support for radical Islamist institutions. Without the Saudi state, the veneer of political correctness that has characterized the U.S. attitude toward Wahhabism would quickly dissolve, and the United States would be free to fight back against radical Islam openly and decisively. Such a world might not be free of terrorism, but at least it would spare Americans the indignity of paying for both sides in the war on radical Islam, classifying 28 pages in the congressional report that dealt with Saudi Arabia’s role in the September 11 attacks, and watching one U.S. president after another, Democrat and Republican alike, bend a knee before a human rights-abusing tyrant.

Now put his Cairo speech in the context of what Gal Luft said. You see the ludicrousness of it. The hard part is figuring out what he should do about the oppressive or dysfunctional governments under which these people live. Not primarily because of his altruistic interest in their welfare if any, but more because some of their nukes may come knocking on our door if they are left to their own devices, no pun intended.