B. Hussein Obama - Muslim World Suck Up Tour - Did He REALLY Say This ??

Oh yes he did....


Welcome to America, "One of the Largest Muslim Countries in the World"! [Andy McCarthy]

Yeah, he said it. Do you think Obama would ever call America a Judeo-Christian country? Anyway, maybe we should rewrite our Constitution to make sharia part of our fundamental law, just like the State Department has done in those other Islamic democracies it is building . . .

From the New York Times:
As President Obama prepared to leave Washington to fly to the Middle East, he conducted several television and radio interviews at the White House to frame the goals for a five-day trip, including the highly-anticipated speech Thursday at Cairo University in Egypt. In an interview with Laura Haim on Canal Plus, a French television station, Mr. Obama noted that the United States also could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” ...

The president said the United States and other parts of the Western world “have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.... And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” Mr. Obama said. “And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.”

Mind you, the total number of Muslims in the U.S. is a subject of intense debate (CAIR, for example, argues for a figure above 6 million because it wants the Muslim population to be thought greater than the Jewish population). The probability, though, is that there are no more than about 3 million Muslims living in the U.S. (See, e.g., this entry from Wikipedia (collecting varying estimates), and this one from Daniel Pipes in 2001, observing that the credible estimates put the figure back then at somewhere between 1.8 and — an unlikely high of — 2.8 million). This, it should be noted, does not translate into 3 million American Muslims, for many Muslims in the United States are are nationals of other countries (although, I suppose, by Justice Department standards, it would translate into approximately 6 million Muslim voters.)

By contrast, of the approximately 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, there are about 200 million Muslims in Indonesia, 196 million in India, 165 million in Pakistan, 132 million in Bangladesh, 75 million in Egypt, 64 million in Iran, 33 million in Morocco, 32 million in Algeria, 31 million in Afghanistan, 26 million in Iraq, 25 million in Ethiopia, 24 million in Saudi Arabia, 20 million in China, and 15 million in Russia, to name just a few countries. In fact, there are 2 to 3 times as many Muslims in Burkina Faso (approx. 7.5 million) as there are in America. So obviously, one can see why the president would say the United States is "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

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Needless to say, Obama's comments have provoked much commentary and outrage today...

A poster to the Caucus blog makes the key point (even if you disagree with the poster's estimate of the American Muslim population):

As an American Muslim, I appreciate what the President is getting at. But it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that the US could be considered one of the LARGEST Muslim countries in the world. There’s still only less than 10 million of us (typically anti-Muslim bigots tend to give the lowest, low-ball estimates, while identity politics playing leaders within Muslim communities favor higher end estimates). Besides, the US is SECULAR, democratic country, not one defined by ANY religion, “racial” or ethnic group. What he perhaps could have said is that the US is one of the freest and best countries in the world to be a practicing Muslim, or for that matter a member of any or no religion.


The Largest Muslim Nation [Michael Rubin]

Andy, Jonah, aside from the factual issue here about Muslim population count, could I suggest that there is a greater problem reflected in Obama's statement? Obama has embraced cultural relativism, and argued that the United States cannot and should not impose its values on other countries. Whether we should or not is a debate for another time. But even if he chooses not to preach American values, rather than define the United States on religious terms, why not at least stand up for the values which made the United States great when describing the United States? The United States is not "a Muslim country." Nor should it be, in my opinion, a "Christian country," except in as much as Western liberalism and the core values of Christianity or Judaism or any other religion overlap with Western liberalism.

Rather, the United States is a country built on the very concepts about which Obama now seems embarrassed: freedom, liberty, respect for property, separation of church and state, constitutionalism, and rule-of-law. Rather than pander to Egyptians as if Egypt is just another constituency on a whistle-stop tour, perhaps Obama should emphasize our freedoms as the core of the American brand name.

It reminds me of an example — pointed out several years ago, I believe by Rob Satloff — of a State Department pamphlet about Muslims in America. About 90 percent of the women in its pictures were veiled. The problem is, that perhaps only 10 percent of American Muslims cover themselves. And yet, rather than send the message that Muslims in America could be free to dress however they wanted without fear of getting beaten, stabbed, or have acid thrown in their faces, the State Department chose to pander and implied acceptance of a far more conservative definition of proper Islam.


Re: Largest Muslim Nation [Andy McCarthy]

Michael, in the April 20 edition of NR, I wrote an essay called "Beyond Terrorism." The point was to argue that — as President Obama said in that interview reported on (as Jonah says, without much examination) by the Times — "the United States and other parts of the Western world 'have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.'"

The difference is that I mean it and he doesn't.

Anyway, the president and Islam's apologists in the West do not speak about the core American values you mention because, if they did, it would become painfully clear that major aspects of sharia (the Islamic legal code) are antithetical to Western democracy. The "Islam" that the president wants to "better educate" about is not the one that actually exists. In the essay, I put it this way

The Koran contains many an ode to tolerance, most of which are from Mohammed’s early Meccan period, when he was seeking to recruit converts to the new religion. Many such benign injunctions were abrogated by the contrary, brutalizing verses of the later Medinan period, when the warrior prophet spread Islam principally by the sword. That inconvenient fact is ignored by the “religion of peace” crowd, whose unparalleled favorite scripture is Sura 2:256, the instruction that there shall be “no compulsion in religion.” On the basis of this directive, they argue, à la Jacqui Smith [the British Home Secretary — or at least she was until she got sacked about five minutes ago], that jihadist violence must be anti-Islamic. A

u contraire. While militants would surely be delighted if, say, the destruction of the Twin Towers induced everyone to convert, that is not the direct goal of jihadist activity — violent or not. The goal is to induce each targeted jurisdiction to adopt sharia. The Muslim Brotherhood’s chief theoretician, Sayyid Qutb, explained that forcible jihad proceeds whenever Islam is obstructed by “the political system of the state, the socio-economic system based on races and classes, and behind all these, the military power of the government.” This system is then supplanted by Islamic law. At that point, Islam can be “addressed to peoples’ hearts and minds,” purportedly without compulsion, “and they are free to accept or reject it with an open mind.”

Jihad is not trying to convert you; it is seeking the imposition of Allah’s law. That law happens to be antithetical to bedrock American principles: It establishes a state religion, rejects the freedom of citizens to govern themselves irrespective of a religious code, proscribes freedom of conscience, proscribes economic freedom, destroys the principle of equality under the law, subjugates non-Muslims in the humiliation of dhimmitude, and calls for the execution of homosexuals and apostates. Nevertheless, its adoption produces what Islamists portray as the non-coercive environment in which people then “freely” embrace Islam. . . .


About America the Muslim Country ... [Andy McCarthy]

the President might want to have a look at Liberty & Tyranny — somebody should be able to get it for him since it is, yet again, number one on the NYT bestseller list. As I outline in a description of the relevant chapter in a review for The New Criterion, Mark
is

especially trenchant on the animating role of faith in the American founding, and, consequently, its place atop the statist hit-list. The Framers understood “that liberty and religious liberty are inseparable.” But Christianity, unapologetically, was and is America’s dominant religion and it is undeniable that Judeo-Christian values heavily influenced our founding law. The point of religious liberty was to forefend the establishment of a theocracy of the type Tocqueville discerned in the Islamic world, where the Qur’an imposed not merely religious tenets but control over every aspect of life. The Supreme Court’s fabrication of a “wall of separation” in its 1947 Everson decision (authored by one-time Klansman Hugo Black, the first justice appointed by FDR), installing official hostility to religion, was “a wretched betrayal of America’s founding.” As a result, “American courts sit today as supreme secular councils, which, like Islam’s supreme religious councils, dictate all manner of approved behavior respecting religion.”

Two Presidential Speeches in Egypt [Dana Perino]

The media is devoting a lot of time previewing President Obama’s speech that he’s giving tomorrow in Egypt. I wonder how many reporters will take the time to read President Bush’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Egypt last year — it’s worth a second look.I’ll be curious to hear what the president says. I expect he will touch on America’s respect for the Islamic faith and religious tolerance in our country (though I’m not sure he will discuss the lack of such tolerance in other countries).It’s likely that he will paint a future of the Middle East as a place of prosperity, peace, and democracy — although he has gone out of his way not to use the word “democracy” in the past, I hope he will use it tomorrow.The question I have is whether he’s willing to talk about the difficult steps on the road to that destination. In President Bush’s speech, he made specific points about supporting democracy advocates, free and fair elections, free-market entrepreneurs, and women.

Given that, the questions I have are:

* Will Obama be willing to speak out against the jailing of political dissidents in Egypt, as President Bush did?
* Will he stand firmly for free elections, even when we may not like the outcome?
* Will he support free-trade measures to help the Middle East connect itself to the global economy?
* Will he be willing to recognize all that the United States has done to protect Muslims over the past several decades — in Kuwait, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq? And not to forget the extraordinary assistance after the tsunami in South Asia and the earthquake in Pakistan (I remember well how Pakistanis up in the mountains called U.S. Chinook helicopters “angels of mercy”).

In all of my time working for him, I noticed that President Bush did not see people as “Muslims” any more than he saw them as Jews or Christians or Buddhists or atheists. He saw them as individuals, each with God-given value, each deserving the universal gift of freedom. The people of the Middle East should be treated with dignity not because they are Muslims, but because they are human beings. And it was on that premise that President Bush reached out to them.


Multiculturalism Trumps Freedom? [Victor Davis Hanson]

In a recent interview President Obama, I think, was logically trying to say that practical hurdles and costs in the real world mean that we cannot simply force other countries to chose a wiser form of consensual government than their own. Instead, he suggested that, "The message I hope to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion — those are not simply principles of the west to be hoisted on these countries. But, rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity, the danger, I think, is when the United States, or any country, thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture."

So I'm not sure what Obama ended up saying, or rather, as usual, I think he is trying to say everything and thus nothing:

Democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. are welcome universal aspirations, regardless of culture and are all without a particular cultural pedigree?
They are largely Western principles that need not be emulated by others, especially through the use of coercion?
Under the right circumstances, such universal principles can properly mesh into Muslim national identity?
In fact, these principles cannot mesh into other cultures with different histories and cultures without an undue and improper amount of coercion?

I think Obama's multiculturalist postmodernist answer would be something like the following:

"Democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion are not properly Western principles as much as universal aspirations, but unfortunately we in the West claim them to be exclusively our own and to be superior to other narratives, and thus we try to force countries with different cultures and histories to embrace them when in fact they are not so universal or so superior after all — at least to the extent that their artificial spread requires anything other than a sort of natural osmosis."

So if Saudi Arabia beheads apostates, or the Sudan practices genocide, are we to understand that these are epiphenomena of indigenous history and culture, in a practical sense properly immune from antidotes like Western-inspired rule of law, human rights, and democracy?