Column: Obama abandons Israel in Muslim speech
By Alex Knepper
UWIRE
June 05, 2009

It has become the president’s trademark, perhaps, to engage himself inside the comforting realm of The World That Should Be. In that world, the answers to America’s conflicts with the Islamic world become easily resolvable, because we are one people with a shared destiny. Living in The World That Should Be, the Enlightenment in Europe came about, in large part, due to the contributions of Islam. In The World That Should Be, Islam has always been a part of America’s story. In The World That Should Be, Muslim communities “in our times” have been “at the forefront of innovation and education.”

But while this game of equivalency might be comforting at a base level — and provided plenty of applause breaks for President Obama during his speech in Cairo — it is simply not true. The Enlightenment in Europe had nothing to do with Islam. America’s story is one of Christianity and secularism, not of Islam. Islamic communities in our times are startingly hostile to modernity.

That’s all irritating, but it’s all boilerplate fodder. There’s a real scandal beneath all of this.

It should now be utterly, blindingly apparent that President Barack Obama is hostile to the cause of Israel. His speech to the Muslim world, full of selective facts and platitudes, made this clear. He subscribes to a completely ahistorical leftist narrative of Israeli history. This disturbing development reveals more than ignorance: it reveals utter hostility. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it: we’re entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. Anti-Israel forces have continually made up their own facts, and it appears that our esteemed president has swallowed the Kool-Aid.

Copyright ©2009 UWIRE

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