President Obama declares that we must not do things that provide Muslims with excuses to hate us. We agree that we should be protective of sensibilities of our friends (and those we want to be our friends). That goes for Canada and Mexico and Europe as well as the Arab world. It makes no sense to take offensive actions or make insulting statements. But the President seems to believe that everything we do somehow is a provocation. The prison at Guantanamo is a provocation, he says. But Guantanamo is not a prison for Muslims, but a prison created to incarcerate the “worst of the worst” terrorists, those who in many cases killed dozens of Muslims for every Christian or Jew they had killed.
Odd, isn’t it, that by the administration’s way of thinking, our negativity towards Muslims somehow transforms them from peaceful people into vengeful killers. The administration thinks American “Islamophobia” (a word they define so broadly as to include normal steps to keep Jihadi terrorists from entering this country) is a provocation. Our war in Iraq was a provocation, and of course, they think (although they seldom say it aloud) that the biggest provocation is America’s support for Israel.
The discussions on the San Bernardino attacks have brought to the forefront of commentary several very perceptive and devout Muslims who are devoted to stopping Jihadism and radicalism and thus risk their lives. The Obama administration ignores these voices, while paying heed to purveyors of pernicious doctrines. One of those it should listen to but doesn’t, a woman doctor of Pakistani descent, stated one very important fact that goes a long way toward explaining the serious dangers the world faces through the rise of radicalism. She said that forty years ago, in Pakistan, one almost never saw a Muslim woman wearing the hijab or similar coverings. Pakistan was a Moslem country, but was secularized, Westernized to a degree. Muslim countries were seldom theocratic. One would think the trend would be to secularization, but today, she says, the hijab is seen everywhere. It is prevalent in Belgium and Sweden and Germany and Great Britain and France, nations that have accepted many millions of Muslim immigrants, refugees and guest workers. Those who entered those nations in the not-too-distant past assimilated. They retained their culture and their religion and their language, but they also adopted that of their hosts and aspired to live as they did. Not today. The anti-radicals risk their lives to resist the rise of Jihadism, yet the President’s refusal to see radical jihadism for what it is makes their task futile.
America defeated Japanese militarism, but we rebuilt Japan. We defeated Naziism, but we rebuilt Germany. And we did not rebuild them into puppets or satellites, but into free and independent nations, that often do things we disagree with or think are not in our interests. We will behave the same way when we defeat radical Islam. Those brave Muslim voices know that we are not at war with Islam, but that we must be at war with radical Jihadism. We wish the President knew it as well.