OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH. Dialogue is good, dhimmitude is not. From a cursory look, Obama’s speech is festooned with feel-good fantasies, cliches, and plain errors, highlighted by the great Robert Spencer, who provides a point-by-point Guide to the Perplexed (via “Virgil”). Naturally, our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one. Terrorism, of course, is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam. However, Hussein omits any reference to “Islam’s bloody borders,” as the scholar Samuel Huntington put it. More from me later.
Over to Spencer, who dishes unvarnished truth.

Update I: ME HERE (see Spencer below) Where to begin? In his speech, Obama equated Islam with peace. That’s nothing new in the annals of American presidents. Remember Bush?

Courtesy of Michelle Malkin, Daniel Pipes, and demographic data: There are only 2.8 million Muslims in the US; not 7, as Obama asserted.

About the greatness of Cairo University. Is anyone of these Nobel Prize greats a graduate?

Thomas Jefferson owned a Koran. So what? So do I.

I’m “an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama.” So the president is owning his name. After making hay about scribes (like this one) who used it in vain.

Grammar: “I’m aware that there’s still some who would question or even justify the events of 9/11.” So he’s not such a pedantic writer. Should be: “there are.”

“The Holy Quran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as — it is as if he has killed all mankind.” Not quite. The adage, bowdlerized from the Jews, is heavily qualified in the Koran. I covered it in “More Fatwa Fibs”.

THIS NEXT ITEM from Hussein, the “student of history,” as he refers to himself, is particularly priceless: “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.”

Memo to Hussein, “student of history”: The ideas of human rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. There is no such thing in Islam, despite what our Head Historian says about “the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.” Does the latter failed parallelism (pairing a country and a religion) mean that Hussein acknowledges Islam is a political system? Or perhaps he is just bad at constructing corresponding syntactic constructions.

This is growing tiresome: the banality of the cliches Obama uses come straight out of … a Michelle Obama univesrity thesis.

LATER.

Update II (June 6) Krauthammer: Speech abstract, vapid, and self-absorbed. Pretty much. This is good. Watch:

SPENCER: I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning,

…whose Grand Sheikh, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, has given his approval — on Islamic grounds — to suicide bombing.

and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.

According to Islamic law, a Muslim may only extend this greeting — Peace be upon you — to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided,” i.e., Peace be upon the Muslims. Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naive non-Muslim Islamophilic Presidents offer the greeting to Muslims.

We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

“Co-existence and cooperation”? When and where, exactly?

Note that Obama lists only ways in which the West has, in his view, mistreated the Islamic world. Not a word about the jihad doctrine, not a word about Islamic supremacism and the imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that existed long before the spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world, which Obama D’Souzaishly suggests is responsible for the hostility Muslims have for the West.

Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.

The idea that the jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, but has no evidence to back it up. The evidence that appears to back it up is highly tendentious — check out here how Dalia Mogahed (now an Obama adviser) and John Esposito cooked survey data from the Islamic world to increase the number of “moderates.”

And of course it was by no means only “the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians” that “has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.” It was also the Islamic texts and teachings that inspired those attacks that have fueled this perception. But Obama is not singular in declining to acknowledge the existence of such texts and teachings. In that he is following George W. Bush and every influential American politician, diplomat, and analyst. …

The complete analysis at Jihad Watch.