by Robert Spencer
IIn his Easter message last Saturday, Barack Obama asserted that the “common thread of humanity that connects us all – not just Christians and Jews, but Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs – is our shared commitment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.”
Even though he was registered as a Muslim in primary school in Indonesia and recounts in his first autobiography that he got in trouble there for making faces in Qur’an class, Obama apparently recalls little of the contents of the Qur’an. For if he did, he would know that it tells Muslims “take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors” (5:51), calls them “the most vile of created beings” (98:6), and calls the patriarch Abraham an “excellent example” for telling his unbelieving relatives: “There has arisen between us and you enmity and hatred forever unless you believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). It also says: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, and harsh to the unbelievers” (48:29).
Enjoining mercy to those who share one’s religious beliefs and harshness to those who do not is hardly tantamount to loving one’s neighbor as oneself, and this sharp dichotomy between believers and unbelievers is not just found in some random Qur’an passages to which no one pays attention. It runs all through Islamic scripture, doctrine and law. It is even an accepted principle in Islam that the life of a non-Muslim is worth less than that of a Muslim: a manual of Islamic law certified by Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar university (from which Obama addressed the Islamic world in June 2009) as “conforming to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” declares: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o4.9)
The Iranian Sheikh Sultanhussein Tabandeh echoed and amplified that point in his Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Since Islam regards non-Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim — then his punishment must not be the retaliatory death, since the faith and conviction he possesses is loftier than that of the man slain…Islam and its peoples must be above the infidels, and never permit non-Muslims to acquire lordship over them.”
While this devaluing of the non-Muslim’s life is based on teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah, there is nothing in Islam that teaches that non-Muslims should be accorded the same rights and dignity as Muslims in an Islamic state.
There is no indication that Obama knows about such Islamic teachings, but even if he did, it is unlikely that he would say anything, since, after all, he has said that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” – and in Islamic law, “slander” is not telling a falsehood about someone, but telling a truth about someone that he does not want known. And after over five years of Obama’s presidency, it is abundantly clear that one thing he does not want Americans to know is that there are texts and teachings of Islam that Islamic jihadists use to justify violence and supremacism, and that jihadis are still trying to murder Americans in accord with those teachings.
As I detail in my book Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, this willful ignorance at the highest levels has endangered Americans more than once, making for murderous attacks that could have and should have been prevented. The most notorious of these are the Boston Marathon bombing and the Fort Hood massacre.
Two years before the Boston bombing, Russian intelligence agents told the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a “follower of radical Islam” who had tried to join “underground groups” in Dagestan. That is tantamount to saying that Tsarnaev was an Islamic jihadist, which should have been enough for the FBI to keep him under constant or at least regular surveillance. It did not – and not coincidentally, right around the time the Russians gave the feds this information, the Obama administration (under pressure from Muslim groups with links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood) mandated the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad (and the dismissal of FBI trainers who spoke about the motives and goals of jihad terrorists, including me). Agents who still knew how to evaluate the Russian intel were probably afraid that to do so, in the prevailing politically correct climate, would have been career suicide.
In the same way, Fort Hood jihad murderer Nidal Malik Hasan rose through Army ranks even as he justified suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America, and he did so with extraordinarily positive recommendations. In an evaluation dated March 13, 2009, just short of eight months before his jihad attack, Hasan’s superiors said that he should be put into a position “that allows others to learn from his perspectives” and declared that his “unique insights into the dimensions of Islam” and his “moral reasoning” could be of “great potential interest and strategic importance to the U.S. Army.”
And indeed, Hasan’s insights into Islam are of great strategic importance to the U.S. Army, but not in a way that Army brass is inclined to accept or admit. To do so would harm “diversity” in the military. And that, apparently, is more important than making sure that there isn’t another jihad massacre.
Robert Spencer
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/obamas-muslim-easter-and-willful-ignorance/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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