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Telling the Truth--Unlike Mr. Obama

Reader comment on item: Assessing Obama's Cairo Speech

Submitted by prof. paul eidelberg (Israel), Jun 4, 2009 at 19:29

In September 1976, I was asked to give a briefing to Defense Minister Shimon Peres's political adviser, Asher Ben-Natan. At the close of our meeting I asked him: "What do you think is Israel's main problem?" He answered: "We can't lie as well as Arabs."

In his Cairo speech, Mr. Obama said "I will speak the Truth, as the Quran Says." But speaking the truth is not obligatory on Muslims—certainly not when dealing with non-Muslims. Indeed, according to the liberated Arab sociologist Sonia Hamady, admitted, "Lying is a widespread habit among the Arabs, and they have a low idea of truth."

No less than the eminent orientalist Sir William Muir (1819-1905) said, "The sword of Muhammad and the Quran are the most fatal enemies of civilization, liberty, and truth which the world has yet known."

Consider the untruth or hoax about the "Palestinian people"—a mere hodgepodge of Arab clans and tribes from the Middle East and North Africa, obviously devoid of any Palestinian culture or language. Professor Efraim Karsh quotes the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti: "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not." It was never "perceived as a distinct entity deserving national self-determination but as an integral part of a unified regional Arab order …"

The day after 9/11, President George W. Bush made the absurd statement that Islam is a religion of peace. Ponder the findings of a monumental study of the Islamic Trilogy, the Quran, the Hadith, and the Sira published in 2007. The study was made by Bill Warner, director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam:

● Of more than 153,000 words in the Koran, only 4,018 or 2.6 percent seem to express goodness to humanity, qualified, however, by obedience to Muhammad.

● The words of Allah are only about 17 percent of the Islamic Trilogy, but the words and actions of Muhammad comprise 83 percent of the Trilogy.

● About 20 percent of the most authoritative school of the Hadith is about jihad.

● At least 75 percent of the Sira is about jihad.

● There are 146 references to hell in the Quran, only 6 percent of which concern moral failings such as murder and theft. The other 94 percent of the reasons for being in Hell are for the intellectual sin of disagreeing with Muhammad, a political crime.

Warner concludes: there is no benevolence toward good nonbelievers in Islam. Moreover, and, contrary to what Obama said in Cairo, there is no golden rule in Islam that restricts what Muslims may do to non-Muslims. This places a big question on Islamic monotheism.

Theologian George Weigel says of Islam: "The notion that there are 'no innocents'—that the enemy is 'guilty' simply by reason of drawing breath—was itself something new and reflected a deliberate strategic choice: a strategy of open-ended mayhem based on the radical dehumanization of the 'other.'"

Islam is so far removed theologically and ethically from Christianity and Judaism that it is misleading lump it with these two faiths under the category of religion, even though it requires worship of a deity and affirms an afterworld—which can also be said of pagan religions.

Consider what Alexis de Tocqueville, the illustrious author of Democracy in America, said of the Quran and of Muslims—and Tocqueville was a man of great reserve:

I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.

Now ponder these quotations from Professor Karsh, Islamic Imperialism:

● "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah.'"

— Prophet Muhammad's farewell address, March 632

● "I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah."

— Saladin, January 1189

● "We shall export our revolution throughout the world . . . until the calls 'there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah' are echoed all over the world."

— Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 1979

● "I was ordered to fight people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad."

— Osama bin Laden. November 2001

Consistent with these murderous vows, the Center for the Study of Political Islam reports that in the pursuit of Islam's global ambitions, Muslims, have slaughtered some 270 million people since Muhammad!

Mr. Obama is so intoxicated with his own oratory that he seems to live in a dream world—certainly not a world in which hundreds of millions of Muslims support jihad, a world in which Muslim leaders scream "DEATH TO AMERICA" and "DEATH TO ISRAEL." But this means, to put in kindly, that Mr. Obama cannot distinguish truth from falsehood. Of course, one may also conclude that America's president is a master of deception.

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