Abominable Apologies

By Alan Caruba

I will leave it to the historians to pinpoint when President Obama began to lose the 2012 election, but I think it occurred on June 4, 2009 when he gave a speech at Cairo University as part of his now-famed “apology tour” of the Middle East.

At the time he said, “We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world—tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate…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 often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

Apparently, to Obama, those tensions had nothing to do with a dastardly attack on September 11, 2001 that killed nearly three thousand non-combatant civilians and those working at their desks in the Pentagon. It had nothing to do with the earlier attack on the Twin Towers, the attack on U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, or, going back to 1983, the suicide bomb attack on Marine barracks in Beirut. And that’s just the short list.

To Obama the “tensions” were the result of “colonialism” despite the fact that most Arab nations in World War II sided with the Nazi regime or that they have always been ruled by a succession of despots, several of whom were deposed in 2011. According to Obama, “the Cold War” with the then-Soviet Union that began shortly after World War II and subsequently aided its downfall was another reason why Muslims hate America.

In Cairo that day, Obama thrice referred to the “holy Koran” while referring to “civilization’s debt to Islam”, saying “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

Those “stereotypes” were reinforced in Afghanistan after riots broke out after the perfectly reasonable destruction of Korans that that been damaged, a practice common to Islam. This was followed by rioting in the streets of Kabul, the shooting of an American colonel and major inside the Afghan Ministry of Interior and, as the Feb 27 edition of The Wall Street Journal noted, “Ten of the 58 U.S.-led coalition soldiers who died this year have been killed by their Afghan comrades in arms.”

In June 2009, Obama said, “In Ankara (Turkey), I made clear that America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.” This clueless president who claimed to be “a student of history” is deliberately ignorant of the fact that Islam, since its inception, has been at war with all other nations and religions. When it swept through the Middle East in its earliest years, it all but destroyed Christianity there and, when it conquered Jerusalem, it built a mosque over one of the most sacred places of Judaism, the Temple Mount.

He promised to “invest $1.5 billion each year over the next five years to partner with Pakistan to build schools and hospitals, roads and businesses…that’s why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend on.”

In that Cairo speech he said, “I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.” His administration wanted to afford the man who planned 9/11 a civil trial in the heart of Manhattan, replete with all the protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution. He did not close Gitmo and the trial was not held after its prospect evoked widespread protest.

Obama said, “No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other” and, in 2011 the citizens of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen rose up to overthrown their own governments—dictatorships—while the citizens of Syria are doing that today. When Iranians filled the streets of Tehran in 2009 to protest their own dictatorship, he said that the United States “should not meddle” in their affairs, depriving them of even a word of encouragement.

Three years ago, Obama was convinced that America’s reputation had been harmed by its vigorous response to 9/11 in Afghanistan and the decision to depose Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein.

His apology to the government of Afghanistan is an abomination.

The fact is that Islam, particularly in the Middle East, is the enemy of democracy in the West and everywhere else it exists. It is tyranny personified. It is the reason why the Middle East has lagged so far behind the rest of the world. It is the reason why military forces are massed around an Iran that threatens to set off a cataclysm when it acquires nuclear weapons.

The U.S. and NATO forces will leave Afghanistan and it will return to its barbaric, seventh century roots. The U.S. and coalition forces have left Iraq and it will return to its ancient schism and conflict between Sunni and Shiite populations everywhere. We tried to drag these nations into the twenty-first century and we failed, but at least we tried.

We are standing aside while Syria’s dictator slaughters his own people. We will likely see the Jordanian king overthrown and we have witnessed 64 years of unrelenting assaults by the so-called Palestinians on Israel, our only true ally in the Middle East.

This President, however, knows nothing of history and has signaled in many ways his partiality to the “religion of peace” that has attacked America and is filling the streets of Muslim-majority nations with the blood of innocent victims.

He will be rejected by Americans in November 2012 just as he has been rejected by the leaders of most of the free world, the leaders of the Soviet Union and China, virtually all of the members of the United Nations, and all the nations of the Muslim world.

America does not need his apologies. America needs to regain the leadership it has earned by opposing despotism throughout its history.

© Alan Caruba, 2012