December 06, 2002

Bush Revisits Mosque to Praise Islam

President Bush pushed ahead yesterday with his administration's efforts to portray Islam in a favorable light, returning to the Islamic Center of Washington for a second visit to the mosque he toured in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Bush's speech at the Islamic Center, on Massachusetts Avenue near Rock Creek Park, was the 17th time since the terrorist attacks that the president has devoted a speech, or a passage of a major speech, to proclaiming the peaceful and humanitarian values of Islam. In doing so, Bush has defied the wishes of several religious and military conservatives who say he should regard the religion as hostile to the United States.

"Islam brings hope and comfort to more than a billion people worldwide," Bush said at the mosque, using wording similar to his earlier remarks on the religion. "Islam affirms God's justice and insists on man's moral responsibility. . . . Islam gave birth to a rich civilization of learning that has benefited mankind."
[...]The purpose of the regular references to Islam as a benign faith is to prevent discrimination against American Muslims and to demonstrate to Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Indonesia, that the United States is hostile to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government but not to Muslims generally.

Uh-huh. Whatever.
We know well that "...discrimination against American Muslims" just isn't happening, first of all. Not really.
Some of them complain about getting "dirty looks" but after 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11 by 19 Arab, Muslim males, with the threats and promise of more to come ever since, who hasn't looked at people who met this "profile" with a lot more wariness, anger and suspicion?
While I understand why President Bush is doing this, I don't care for it at all.
If the President is going to go out of his way to "educate" Americans about Islam, he might as well go all the way and educate us (including himself?) about the different types of Islam: i.e. Sun'i, Shi'a, but most especially about Islamism and radical Moslem extremism that preaches jihad and slaughter of infidels.
After all, there are certainly different kinds of Christians and Jews and even Buddhists; Bush would never mistake Catholic practices for Mormon and we all can identify sect members like Hassidic Jews and Francisan brothers by their dress.
When Bush states that "Islam affirms God's justice and insists on man's moral responsibility. . .," one could say, well, yes, but isn't that what Osama Ben Laden is asserting as his mandate to kill Americans and take on the "Great Satan?"
On a smaller scale, Islamic clerics/judges evoke these precepts to throw people off cliffs, to have them beheaded and to cut off their hands and feet for "sins" which are also "crimes" under Muslim "shari'a" law.
Moreover, when the President adds," . . . Islam gave birth to a rich civilization of learning that has benefited mankind.," this fallacy is getting moldy and tired.
There are many scholars of Islam that maintain that very little intellectual flowering occurred in the great Islamic empires and kingdoms of the past and that this is just a plain myth.(and no, they didn't even give us the "zero!" That was the Indians.)
I'm almost certain that President Bush is doing this for 2 reasons:
1.) To laud the importance and role of religious faith, any faith, in American and human life.
2.) More critically, he's trying to avoid accusations of starting a "War on Islam" or of jump-starting that "Clash of Civilizations" between the West and Islam that we keep hearing about.
This is unavoidable, however.
It happened to his father, Bush 41, despite all the assurances and signs of good faith that he made to the Islamic leaders: during the Gulf War, the Islamic nations truly believed that George H.W. Bush was waging a "War against Islam" (Note: even the Saudis, who asked the U.S. to stop Saddam, a "brother Muslim," ended up feeling this way from 1991 onwards) and unlike our post 9/11- scenario now with Iraq, Islam and religion in general played very little role after Saddam marched into Kuwait. Saddam Hussein, to Bush 41, was simply a tyrant, bully and a military invader.)
More importantly, however there is a real Battle of Civilizations underway here.
Radical, jihadi Islam cannot be allowed to be practiced anywhere on the globe, because its application now inevitably involves terrorism.
Most Muslims in the world are moderates and the kind of Islam they practice is tolerable in a peaceful, secular society--that is what I think President Bush is saying--but it's the small minority who are radicalized that concern us all in the global War on Islamist terrorism.
These jihadi Muslims want to slay infidels and take over the world by force in order to set up their Dar Al-Islam where brutal shari'a law, the Islamic code of "morality" and "justice" is enforced throughout.
[Is Bush ready to set up a chopping block in Washington and every other major city so that such Islamic "justice" can be carried out here, just to be "tolerant?"]
As we have seen, this Islamic system has worked out very poorly for the peoples and economies where it is implemented.
Very poorly indeed.
Hence the reason the terrorists leave their homes and come to make war on us.
Either President Bush is naive--which I don't think he is--or he's assuming the American people are naive, which they most certainly are not!
I think most citizens can innately sense the "radical difference" between ordinary Muslims, such as people they may live and work with, and Islamist terrorists.
Bush must go "all they way" and delineate the difference between radical and moderate Islam or quit making these photo op visits to whatever mosque happens to be close to the White House (Has he checked that it isn't Wahhabi?).
If the President is playing this out for a "world" audience, he shouldn't really bother.
Radical Muslims are going to think what they like, according to their imams and mullahs, no matter what President Bush says or does about "Islam, the peaceful religion."
Speaking of Islamic clerics, we've heard precious few denounce Jihadi, radical Islam in public or show much zeal to educate the non-Muslim public about the differences between jihadi Islamists and the majority of moderate Muslims, who shun violent jihad and the slaughter of "infidels."
Sects such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons have spent millions on missionaries, telling people who they are and what they believe.
Why can't moderate Muslims?
Or are they too busy spending their money on the surviving loved ones of suicide bombers in Israel?
Why is this President Bush's job and not their clerics?

Bush's efforts continued to rankle some conservatives. The conservative Free Congress Foundation yesterday released an article by one of its scholars, William S. Lind, mockingly comparing Bush's efforts to a celebration of the Japanese religion of Shinto after the Pearl Harbor attacks.

Call me a hothead, by I have the same reaction myself.
Sure, Religious Tolerance is one of the most basic and important principles upon which our country thrives, but must Bush kowtow so much?
And Muslims don't come to America because they're persecuted in other places in the world.
On the contrary, Muslims are usually the ones doing the persecuting these days of Christians, Jews and Hindus.
What will Bush do next? Go to Mecca?

American Muslim groups have urged Bush to speak out more forcefully against conservatives who have maligned Islam as an enemy of the United States. Even these groups, however, have been surprised by the number of opportunities Bush has taken to deliver his "Islam is peace" message, as Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations described it recently. "Even I get a little tired of that," Hooper said.

Well, Hoop, take a number, that line forms to the left!
And President Bush, I pray to God (Not Allah. notice.) that you're not endangering American lives and aiding and abetting Islamist terrorism by doing things like this!
I firmly believe that Bush cannot wage war on Islamist terrorism abroad while playing an appeaser to (what are inevitably some) radical Islamists at home.
Will today's mosque which is the site of a presidential visit because it exemplifies the spread of a "peaceful" religion be tomorrow's terrorist hotbed, cited by an F.B.I. investigation as one of the "centers" of Wahhabi-based terrorism in America?
Will the worshippers who greet Bush on TV in the Beltway today be found to be plotting more murders of Americans "for the faith" next week?
Stranger things can and already have happened.
Enough with the Muslims already!
It's time to have Jewish Hannukah and Christian Christmas, for God's sake!
While regular readers know I'm a huge Bushie, I just can't stomach this extreme deference to Muslims, especially after 9/11.
Bush, this time, is wrong! (Where are Spoons and Bill Quick to help me?!?)
Do you want to know what's worst of all?
I don't think for a moment that Bush himself believes this *crap* about Islam and I think that's why it rankles so badly with all of us.
This is perhaps the one thing that President Bush has been Clinton-like about: he's lying to himself, but most importantly, he's trying to sell the American people on a bill of goods that none of us are ever going to buy.
Disengenuousness and lying is a sin in just about all religions.
And the road to Hell really is "paved with good intentions" like Bush's.
Be careful, Mr. President. We live in dangerous times.
All Muslims are created equal, but for the Islamists who pledge a higher loyalty to their radical sect(s) which put Islamic shari'a and the murder and subjugation of "infidels" first, they have placed themselves above the law of this country.
As such, they are no different than the KKK lynch mobs of the Jim Crow south.
There are still too many of these self-styled Mujihadeen in this country (who just happen to congregate at mosques?) for the Bush Administration not to be busy visiting with criminal warrants and subpoenas, rather than favoring with "social calls."