Barack Obama - a view from Israel

.

President Barack Obama

by Paul Eidelberg

In his Inaugural Address, President Barack Obama declared that America is “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and non-believers.” According to Islam, however, all non-Muslims are “non-believers” or “infidels.” Among such non-believers are all the signers of the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution!

Obama’s faux pas, if it may called that, is of world-historical significance. It is a portent of America’s decline. The day before his inauguration, Obama said he would bring the American people a new Declaration of Independence, one that will be free of petty thinking, prejudice, and bigotry. In view of such monumental arrogance, I dare say America will not survive Obama’s presidency. I therefore urge Jews in the United States to leave as soon as possible for Israel and hasten the ultimate ascendancy of the only God-bearing nation.

It is no accident that Obama’s father was a Muslim. Since Islam prescribes patrilineal descent, hundreds of millions of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims regard the President of the United States as one of their own, even though, by professing Christianity he is an apostate.

Influenced by the doctrine of progress or of historical evolution, Obama represents the antithesis of the American Declaration of Independence, which postulates immutable principles rooted in the ethical monotheism of the Bible and the natural rights doctrine of Greek political philosophy.

That tradition was undermined when Woodrow Wilson, influenced by Darwinism, substituted historical evolution for the immutable truths of the Declaration. Thereafter the Constitution became a “living (or evolving) constitution,” which subordinates the intentions of the Framers to the egalitarian or populist predilections of the Supreme Court. The will of men, of judicial activists, replaced the rule of law.

Enter Barack Obama and the slogan of CHANGE and “YES WE CAN.” “Change”? Yes, from a nation based in individual entrepreneurship to one based on government “entitlements,” a government that empowers the “WE,” not the “I.”

Descending from these abstract ideas to earthly facts: according to some estimates, about 20% of the world’s Muslim population supports jihad—a number equal to the population of the United States. Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Islamic scholars, states: “The overwhelming majority of classical theologians, jurists, and traditionalists … understood the obligation of jihad in a military sense, and have examined and expounded it accordingly.” A word about Islam’s sacred book.

The Quran represents, for Muslims, the “final revelation” of God, conveyed to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. Every word of the Quran, every syllable, every letter manifests absolute truth. Those who reject Islam reject the truth. Hence there is no reason for Muslims, who possess the truth, to tolerate error or to respect its purveyors—the kafirs, the community of “non-believers.” This is why Islam, from its inception in the seventh century to the present day, has pillaged and destroyed countless Jewish, Christian, and Hindu communities.

The myth of a “Golden Age,” when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived in harmony, has been refuted by Bat Ye’or’s Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide. Elsewhere, she refers to Islam as “The Culture of Hate.” Islam “has multiple heads from Algeria to Afghanistan, to Indonesia, via Gaza and the West Bank, Damascus, Cairo, Khartoum, Teheran, and Karachi. It scatters the seeds of terrorism from one end of the earth to the other.”

The principle of human equality, which Obama emphasized in his Inaugural Address, is foreign to Islam. So too are the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Quran therefore rejects the “self-evident” truths of the American Declaration of Independence. Properly understood, Islam rejects the Biblical conception of man’s creation in the image of God.

Conversely, the Declaration rejects the Islamic belief that the Quran is the repository of truth. Hardly any democratic intellectual dares question the basic beliefs, including the monotheism, of 1.5 billion people. To question the truth of Islam smacks of racism or “Islamophobia,” something abhorrent to democrats. Dominated by moral relativism, the West is in no position to refute Islam. One does not refute Islam by saying Muslims have slaughtered 270 million people since the time of Muhammad.

Nor does one refute Islam by recalling how the horrible death of 3,000 human beings on 9/11 was gleefully celebrated throughout the Islamic world. But what about “Muslim moderates”? The issue of Muslim moderates is strategically irrelevant, since they do not control any Islamic state. More significant, as Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament, has pointed out, “There is no moderate Islam, there will never be a moderate Islam.” This is the only honest conclusion one can draw from the Quran, which Churchill called the Mein Kampf of war.

So what is to be done vis-à-vis a creed whose adherents slaughter men, women, and children in the name of Allah and his prophet, and are applauded by countless believers? Dr. Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-born psychiatrist, said Islam cannot be reformed; it must be transformed. Long before that happens, Muslim despots will possess weapons of mass destruction; and since they do not regard human life as sacred, they will not hesitate to use those weapons.

President Obama, however, is so intoxicated with his oratorical skill that he thinks he can pacify the murderous hatred that animates Muslims like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who calls for a world without America.

A world without America means a world devoid of what made America the greatest nation on earth: the immutable truths of the Declaration of Independence. But what can be immutable when a desire for CHANGE, disconnected from PERMANENCE, made a person of Obama’s radically socialist and chameleon character President of the United States? Can one inspire reverence, can one inspire national solidarity, without emphasizing what is permanent and therefore transcends what is here today and gone tomorrow?