On Sunday May 1, the night that President Obama announced to the world the elimination of bin Laden, he was adamant in asserting, “We’re not now nor will we ever be at war with Islam.” This unsolicited statement must have been encouraging to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his bosses, the Mullahs running Iran, given that they are arming Hugo Chavez, the Dictator for Life of Venezuela, with medium range missiles capable of striking the United States. It must have invigorated Dr. Imad Mustafa of Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the most respected Islamic institution in the world, who early in 2011, endorsed al Qaeda’s doctrine of “offensive jihad” against non-Muslims who prohibit sharia law, that is, all western powers which refuse to allow polygamy and the murder of apostates. It must have encouraged the elements within the Muslim world which, in the midst of the so-called “Arab Spring,” are now on the move, blowing up police stations in Pakistan and in Iraq, attacking our troops in Afghanistan, planning and carrying out “lone-wolf” attacks inside the U.S. It must have been reassuring to jihadists worldwide to know that the President of the United States pledged that there is no war with Islam.
The Judeo Christian West has certainly been at war with major elements of Islam almost unceasingly over the past 14 centuries. For example, in June of 1683, 500,000 soldiers of the Islamic Ottoman Empire encamped outside Vienna and began siege operations against the capital of the Hapsburg Empire. Had not Christian armies from Poland and surrounding duchies not come to Vienna’s rescue and defeated the Ottomans on September 11, 1683, (the anniversary selected by bin Laden for the attacks on America) the fall of Western Civilization would have been at hand. For the long and horrible summer of 1683, while Islamic cannons pounded the walls of their city, the starving inhabitants of Vienna had little doubt that they were at war with the soldiers of Allah.
Just days after the hit on bin Laden, two American Islamists were arrested in New York as they purchased weapons from undercover FBI agents on their way to attack Manhattan synagogues. Yet this president continues to go to extraordinary lengths, in various venues here and in the Middle East, to assert that the murder of Americans by jihadists in New York, the Pentagon, Fort Hood, Bagdad, or Kabul has nothing to do with Islam. But Major Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, the Nigerian who tried to blow up the Northwest flight 253 over Detroit and the Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen who almost turned Times Square into a smoldering crater, all professed their dedication to pure Islam. Dutifully, Obama’s loyal Attorney General, Eric Holder, in testimony before Congress, refused to make any connection between Muslim attacks on the West and any religious belief.
More and more, Americans are not buying the President’s pitch, given that there isn’t any reciprocity emanating from the rulers of the Islamic world. Americans are now fully aware that denunciations of Muslim terror attacks against the West by influential Islamic clerics, scholars and heads of state have been muted, ambivalent and painfully few. We are aware that simply because President Obama declares that we are not at war with Islam does not preclude the possibility that Islam is at war with us. The evidence for this possibility continues to mount first of all because there is this unimpeachable fact—while not all Muslims are terrorists, almost all terrorists are Muslim.
Then there is the problem of the Quran. Children throughout the Muslim world learn from an early age that the Koran divides the world into two realms, dar al Islam (the house of Islam) and dar al harb (the house of war). Despite the apologist efforts of our president, we can understand the obvious distinction between description and invocation in religious texts. While the Torah or the Old Testament might describe military victories over various enemies in the distant past, it is quite another phenomenon when the Quran, which all Muslims believe is the literal word of God, invokes the believers to—Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them. There is no similar invocation in any Jewish or Christian religious texts. Moreover, nearly all the Muslim terrorists captured on the battlefields of Iran or Afghanistan or inside the U.S. freely admit that they are acting in obedience to their religious doctrine.
Then there is the problem of Israel. Polling conducted throughout Islamic world reveals that an extremely high percentage of Muslims have a deep hatred for Jews and do not believe that Israel has a right to exist. The Iranian regime which actively calls for the destruction of Israel, refers to it as “little Satan” and to the U.S. as the “Great Satan.” If most Muslims favor the war to destroy Israel, given that the United States is the primary benefactor of Israel, are we Americans not their enemy as well?
Then there was the gang rape in Cairo of the CBS reporter, Lara Logan, by the supposed democracy loving Egyptian freedom fighters. On February 11, 2011, on the night that Egyptian President Mubarak resigned, Ms. Logan and her camera crew walked toward Tahrir Square amid thousands of jubilant Egyptians. All went well until the battery powering her cameraman’s floodlight went out. Immediately a cloud of over 100 rapists descended upon her, tearing all her clothes off and manually and conventionally raping her in all orifices while others filmed the event on the cell phones and yelled, “Jew, Jew, American bitch.”
After several months of rehabilitation, Ms. Logan’s appearance on the 60 Minutes broadcast was aired on May 1, 2011 but was eclipsed by Obama’s announcement of the bin Laden assassination. She said, “For an extended period of time, they raped me but what really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them.” She felt that she would ultimately be killed but the moving cloud rapists and voyeurs spilled up against a fence where a group of shrouded Islamic women were sitting and who were able to cover her with their bodies until some soldiers could rescue her.
What 60 Minutes could not bring itself to conclude was that the massive gang rape of Ms. Logan, involving several hundred rapists and voyeurs could not have occurred in a major or lesser western city, not in London, Madrid, Paris, New York, Dallas, or Tupelo. It’s obvious that men brought up in the Judeo/Christian West would have come to Ms. Logan’s rescue if they saw her in the grip of group of thuggish rapists. Not so for the female infidel in the newly liberated Cairo. For the western observer of Ms. Logan’s rape not conflicted by multicultural political correctness, the implications were and are obvious.
