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Last week, Spengler suggested Obama’s Cairo speech should have been make in India. Now we can get his reactions to the speech from his blog.
Of many strange moments in President Obama’s Cairo speech, perhaps the strangest is the conclusion:
The Holy Quran tells us, Mankind, we have created you male and a female. And we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.
The Talmud tells us, The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.
The Holy Bible tells us, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.What does the idea of gender and tribe distinction have to do with peace? The answer is nothing, except that Obama’s speechwriters felt compelled to drag out some Koranic quotation that sounded vaguely like the biblical and rabbinic concept of peace. The fact that this was the best they could do speaks volumes.
The first human vision of universal peace came from Isaiah, and all classic Jewish sources repeat this theme, as do Christian sources. The Koran, however, contains numerous warnings not to make peace with non-Muslims, but not a single statement comparable to those in Jewish and Christian sources. This may be verified by searching for the word, “peace,” in any of the several online versions of the Koran, including this one from the University of Michigan. …
In another post, Spengler deals with the moral equivalence arguments.
… Or equivalencies between perceived Muslim suffering and Jewish suffering. Israeli leaders noted with distaste Obama’s equation of the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering. The Jerusalem Post reported this morning:
“Obama shockingly equated the destruction of European Jewry to the suffering Arabs brought upon themselves when they declared war on the nascent state of Israel,” National Union MK Arye Eldad said. “If he doesn’t understand the difference, perhaps he will when he visits the Buchenwald camp [on Friday]. And if he still won’t get it then, the Muslims will teach him a painful lesson that his predecessor learned on September 11.”
Just what is the great “suffering” of the Palestinian people? Per capital income of Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza strip is estimated at $2,900, or $8 a day. Half of Egyptians live on $2 a day or less. Living standards among Palestinian “refugees” (no where else in history have the great-great-grandchildren of refugees been classified as refugees) are somewhat better than those in Egypt and other Arab countries without substantial oil exports. Foreign aid per capita of $300 per year is the highest in the world. The Palestinians, to be sure, are subject to considerable annoyance and delays in movement due to Israeli counterterrorism controls, but that is another matter.
Nonetheless, the humiliation of the Palestinians — for it is humiliation rather than impoverishment — looms as large in Arab eyes as the extermination of European Jewry. Obama obliged by accommodating the linked megalomania and paranoia of his audience. …
If you think he is harsh, he’s just a warm-up for Anne Bayefsky in National Review.
President Obama’s Cairo speech was nothing short of an earthquake — a distortion of history, an insult to the Jewish people, and an abandonment of very real human-rights victims in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is not surprising that Arabs and Muslims in a position to speak were enthusiastic. It is more surprising that American commentators are praising the speech for its political craftiness, rather than decrying its treachery of historic proportions.
Obama equated the Holocaust to Palestinian “dislocation.” In his words: “The Jewish people were persecuted. . . . anti-Semitism . . . culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. . . . Six million Jews were killed. . . . On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” This parallelism amounts to the fictitious Arab narrative that the deliberate mass murder of six million Jews for the crime of being Jewish is analogous to a Jewish-driven violation of Palestinian rights.
Speaking in an Arab country to Arabs and Muslims, Obama pointedly singled out European responsibility for the Holocaust — “anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” In other contexts, the European emphasis would be a curiosity. In Egypt, it was no accident. The Arab storyline has always been that Arabs have been forced to suffer the creation of Israel for a European crime.
In fact, Obama’s Egyptian hosts would have been only too familiar with Arab anti-Semitism during World War II (and beyond). After all, Obama was speaking in the country that schooled and later welcomed back Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini as a national hero. This was the man who spent the war years in Berlin as Hitler’s guest facilitating the murder of Jews. …
You knew we were going to find our way to Evan Thomas’ Obama as ”sort of god” comment. Peter Wehner in Contentions leads the way.
On Friday evening Newsweek editor Evan Thomas had an extraordinary exchange with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Thomas, commenting on Obama’s Cairo speech, said, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.” And when Thomas was asked by Matthews, “Reagan and World War II and the sense of us as the good guys in the world, how are we doing?” Thomas replied:
Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task. We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he — he has a very different job from — Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is “we are above that now.” We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.
These comments reveal several notable things.
The first is that it is now impossible to mock the media’s adoration for Obama. In the past, if conservatives had said that MSM commentators viewed Obama as God, people would have assumed they were exaggerating in order to make a point. But in this instance, there is no exaggeration; Thomas stated that Obama is “sort of God.” It appears as if in their unguarded moments, Thomas and those like him really do view Obama as the Anointed One, a political Messiah, not only a gift from heaven but the Creator of Heaven and Earth. …
A Jim Manzi Corner post shows how ignorant Evan Thomas is about Reagan’s tributes to our allies.
I think Evan Thomas is pretty far off-base when says in reference to the symbolic meaning of various D-Day observances that:
…Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.”
Here are the first nine paragraphs of Reagan’s famous “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech given at Normandy on the 40th anniversary of D-Day (all bold added):
We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began. Here, the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, two hundred and twenty-five Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. …
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