President Barack Obama’s speech at the Islamic Society of Baltimore mosque in Maryland on February 3 masked what the president wanted hidden.
What he hid in choosing this particular mosque, delivering the message he did and not unmasking the one eternal divide between Islam and all other religions is unconscionable. It was an effort to minimize the threat a venomous rattlesnake poses by simply removing its rattle—serving only to reduce one’s reaction time before it strikes.
President Barack Obama speaks to members of the Muslim-American community at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016, in Baltimore, Md. Obama is making his first visit to a U.S. mosque at a time Muslim-Americans say they're confronting increasing levels of bias in speech and deeds.(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Lost upon most Americans but not most Muslims was the symbolism attached to the mosque where Obama spoke.
To understand this symbolism, one first must understand Obama’s inexplicable and unholy Muslim Brotherhood alliance.
The Brotherhood’s motto makes no effort to hide its goal: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
One might choose to dismiss this goal with the notion, what the Brotherhood does in its own yard is its own business. However, this ignores its game plan—in place now for 25 years—seeking to impose its goal upon us in our own yard.
The Brotherhood secretly wrote an action plan in 1991, known as “the Project,” detailing how to destroy the U.S. from within. Exposed in 2004, it still is being implemented today through various Brotherhood U.S. front companies. It seeks to undermine U.S. laws, gradually replacing them with shariah, using political correctness and our own laws against us.
In fact, it was with such a front company, the Council on American-Islamic Relation—a 2007 unindicted co-conspirator in one of the largest terrorist financing trials in U.S. history—Obama colluded to select the Baltimore mosque.
Before CAIR was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator, the FBI had partnered with it to develop a better rapport with Muslim communities. However, the label led the FBI to sever that relationship as it did “not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.” Since then, CAIR has aggressively opposed FBI efforts to counter violent Islamism.
In 2014, even after the Brotherhood and CAIR terrorist designations were issued by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Obama continues to embrace both.
The mosque CAIR helped select fell under FBI surveillance in 2010 after a member was arrested for planning to bomb a U.S. Army recruiting center. The mosque previously had been led for 18 years by an imam who taught suicide bombings were sometimes justified.
Rather than selecting a mosque symbolizing Obama’s claim Islam is a peaceful religion, he chose one symbolizing radical Islam.
What message does this convey to non-Muslims wanting to believe Islam is peaceful? What message does it convey to Muslims wanting to distance their religion from violence? And what message does it convey about Obama’s continuing ties to a group still committed to fulfilling "the Project’s" goal?
In his comments, Obama thanked Muslims for their contributions to America “starting in colonial times.” He suggested thank you is something they do not hear enough.
Perhaps America lost sight of such contributions because, as a newly independent nation, we found ourselves fighting our first two wars against Islam’s Barbary pirates. They had attacked our ships and enslaved American crews, claiming Islam sanctioned unprovoked attacks against non-Muslim nations.
What we can thank Muslims for is an ideology that prompted our Founding Fathers to understand, after the first Barbary war, the need to fund a naval force with which to fight, what they foresaw, as a likely second war.
Obama’s Baltimore speech criticized anti-Muslim political rhetoric as “inexcusable” and having “no place” in America—adding that “an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths.”
But that begs the question, what rhetoric, then, is appropriate about Islam? As the Koran arguably contains 109 violent verses, are these open to discussion? What about the Koran’s claim Islam is superior to all other religions (3:85)? Do not such statements throughout the Koran suggest Islam, by its very existence, is an attack against all other faiths—or does this discussion, too, constitute inexcusable rhetoric?
Praising America’s tolerance towards all religions—quoting Benjamin Franklin at one point (“even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach to us, he would find a pulpit at his service”)—Obama ducked Islam’s own intolerance.
In the past, Obama recalled hearing, as a young boy growing up in a Muslim country, Islam’s call to prayers, describing it as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” But his Baltimore speech failed to explain the silence of church bells within those same countries. They are silenced by an Islam that bans all other religions. Is discussion of this also “inexcusable?”
Obama spoke of a 13-year-old Muslim girl from Ohio who wrote to him concerning her fears about anti-Islamic sentiment.
While hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. are on the rise, they still pale in comparison to those against a group Muslims themselves victimize—Jews. Jews have long been so targeted. FBI statistics reveal, for religiously-biased hate crimes in 2012, anti-Jew incidents vastly outnumbered anti-Muslim ones 62.4 percent to 11.6 percent. But Obama has yet to give a speech at a synagogue expressing concerns about young Jewish girls or boys with every right to fear anti-Semitism.
Nor did Obama’s mosque speech challenge Muslims to do their part to distance themselves from Islamism by calling out such extremist ideology.
While quick to challenge Islam’s critics, Obama has failed—or refused—to unmask a major divide Islam’s ideology presents, driving a wedge between it and all other religions. Memorialized in the seventh century and re-asserted in 1991 by Islamic scholars, the “Conditions of Omar” claim Islam’s right to control and eventually eliminate all other religions.
By failing to unmask Islam for what it really is, Obama leaves us a rattlesnake, relieved of its rattle but not of its deadly venom.
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