Obama The "Muslim"

A very great deal of ink both real and virtual has been spilled in the wake of the Pew poll showing a spike in the percentage of Americans who either think President Obama is a Muslim or simply throw up their hands and answer "don't know." Through all the fog over the president's religious beliefs or lack thereof, a single point demands acknowledgement.

Mr Obama is seen as fundamentally lacking in (a) honesty, (b) candor, (c) understanding of the American predicaments and (d) commitment to the well-being of We the People both domestically and as a player in international affairs. The president's often noted style of cerebral detachment has been widely perceived as utter indifference to the decline of American fortunes both at home and around the world.

In short, The Nice Young Smiley Man From Chicago has been increasingly viewed as not being like the rest of us, not a member in good standing of We the People. His evident hauteur, arrogance, willingness to view so many Americans and their very real worries about the present and future in both domestic and foreign contexts as unworthy of his concern.

Americans have long expected that their politicians, particularly their president, evidently subscribe to what can best termed the American civic religion. This religion, as President Eisenhower indicted through the fog of intentionally warped syntax, is a loose fusion of Judaic and Christian values and imperatives, the product of that World War II era American invention, "the Judeo-Christian heritage."

Subscription to this civic religion requires some specifically liturgical components: going to church at least now and then, invoking the name of the deity on appropriate occasions, and making appropriate genuflections to the power of prayer.

Beyond that it requires acting in ways which are commensual with fundamentally Judeo-Christian values and beliefs. These include an eschewing of unnecessary secrecy, an emphasis upon the better aspects of human behavior, a support for American values politically and socially.

Overall, the requirements of adhering to and expressing the American civic religion are neither onerous nor difficult. Presidents from FDR to Bill Clinton have done so effortlessly and without any questions arising about the nature and character of their beliefs.

Americans are not comfortable with politicians, again particularly presidents, who are too religious, too given to invoking the deity as justification for their policies. George W. Bush was culpable of this--particularly in foreign policy. He was given to averring that God had called him to be president; that God had placed certain tasks before him. His references to the deity, to missions imposed upon him by that deity served to denature his protestations that the US was waging war on adherents of violent political Islam and not Islam per se.

President Obama has gone too far, way too far, in the opposite direction. His policies have seemed to have been predicated upon both an undue concern for the high opinion of Muslims and a complete disregard for the imperatives of the American civic religion.

It is easy to see how many Americans could come to view the president's constant "outreach" to Muslim states and governments as a sign that he is truckling to the perceived dictates of the Muslim faith. When coupled with the administration's cavalier treatment of Israel--which in and of itself violates the "Judeo-Christian heritage"--the view is that Mr Obama is tilting toward Islam as Islam rather than pursuing a clear, rational foreign policy.

Mr Obama's scoffing at "American exceptionalism" as well as his deprecation of the moral right of the US to operate on the global stage without the full, consensual approval of the "international community" also violates the foundation of the American civic religion.

For generations now the American public has viewed the efforts of its government to inculcate stability, deter war, uplift democracy, protect and foster the rights of individual humans not simply as foreign policies but as virtual mandates from the vague deity of the American civic religion. Mr Obama's words and actions have called this long treasured belief into serious question. At the same time he has advanced no real world based justification for having undercut these values and policies.

Even without the purely domestic considerations which may serve to show how Mr Obama has spurned the American civic religion, the foreign policy aspects alone demonstrate how simple it can be to conclude that the president may be either a Muslim of a person whose religious center cannot be seen nor understood.

Whether Mr Obama and others of the multi-cultural, blame-America-first, nationalism-is-dead school like it or not, the US, or, to err on the side of accuracy, We the People, have been and are informed predominately by the religions of Europe--Christianity and Judaism. We have denatured the core of both faiths significantly as we developed our unique, non-compulsory civic religion of the past seventy-five or so years. A politician, particularly a president, ignores this ground truth at peril.

Barack Obama may be a Christian. He might be an animist. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the president's words, actions, policies, even his body language, has conveyed both dismissal and distaste directed at the American civic religion, the "Judeo-Christian heritage." As long as he does so there is no surprise that a greater and greater percentage of We the People will view him as an adherent of a hostile religion or as a person for whom religion in any and all its myriad forms is a stranger passing in the night.

Warning! Stop the "God Gap"

The WaPo reported today on a study sent to the White House by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The Council is influential not by its reputation or size but rather by its close relationship with President Obama since the days he was an ambitious state senator.

The substance of the study is the pernicious influence of secularism on American foreign policy and relations. The thirty-two member committee which authored the report sees this as having resulted in a serious diminishment of our "capabilities." As a result the committee recommended the Obama administration make religion an "integral part of our foreign policy."

Whew!

This view is, to use a Buddhist notion, both good and bad. Religion is a very powerful motivator and consolidator of political action. The world has seen this reality more times than one cares to think about over the past several thousand years.

The world certainly sees the power and pertinacity of religion today. There is no way that an individual, let alone a responsible government, can say that any factor other than religious belief systems has been responsible for the vast majority of killing and dying the past decade.

The American political, academic, and chattering class elite has been flatly schizo about religion and its effects on human behavior--particularly since the potency of religiously predicated fear and loathing was demonstrated so vividly on 9/11. On the one hand the elite of this country (and most of the West generally) has sought to uphold the secular ideal of separation between the instruments of state and the communities of faith(s). On the other they have sought to hold Islam qua Islam harmless against the charge of any linkage between its beliefs and the consequences seen on and after that fateful September morning.

The attempt to remove Islam from the realm of political expression--including violence and terror--is both a disservice to our country and an insult to Islam. In short, insofar as there is a "God gap" in this area, it comes from our willful and repeated insistence that somehow Islam has no political dimension, and thus Muslims who engage in violence, terror, jihad, are somehow misunderstanding and misinterpreting Islam.

The reduction of the resulting "God gap" and its impact on US foreign policy consists simply of acknowledging the reality contained in the Koran and the other sacred writings of Islam. It means accepting the fact that Islam contains at its very heart the justification for suicide bombings, terror, and a constant screen of intentional prevarication meant to mislead and discommode the opposition: the infidels and apostates. It means taking Islam at its sacred word: of Islam's division of the human race into the house of peace (Islam) and the house of war (everybody else) as well as the need for constant warfare until the house of war is bought into complete subjugation.

This necessary adjustment of view does not imply a couple of important things.

The recognition of the role of Islam per se in the acts of Islamist jihadist warfare does not, for example, imply that all Muslims are ready, willing, and eager to strap on a suicide vest, or pick up an AK, or even provide money to those who are doing so. Most Muslims are not unlike the majority of adherents of other faiths. They are compartmentalized in their thinking. Some matters are for the mosque, for prayers, for the sacred days; others are secular, for this world and not the next, for today and for the individual or his family not for tomorrow and the entire Muslim "community."

Most Muslims are not willing to risk all in the hopes that by doing so they will find paradise or at least avoid hell. The same may be said of most Christians, most Jews, most Hindus and so on. But, at the same time, honesty requires that we all acknowledge that the sacred soul of Islam unlike the other major religions provides rich justification, even provocation for war and its nasty ancillaries. To do less is not only to create a "God gap" but to denature Islam, to diminish it and the power the faith has for its believers.

The second implication is simpler. The US would be ill-advised to say the least if it were to hawk its presumed Christian or (much as the Geek hates this circumlocution) the "Judeo-Christian" heritage and foundation. It does not matter how "godly" we Americans proclaim ourselves to be now or in our past, the fact remains that it is the "wrong" sort of "God" to whom we offer our thanks or our importunings. To the Muslim and even more to the political Muslim, the Islamist, Christians and, to a greater extent, the Jew is misguided at a minimum. The Christian, the Jew follow incomplete revelations, revelations polluted by man while Islam is pure and complete, the final revelation given to the "Perfect Man," the Prophet Mohammad.

In short, saying, "See, we Americans are godly," won't cut the mustard with the adversary. Our propensity for political "God talk" will be of no avail in the Manichean world of the Islamist, the political Muslim. It may play well in Peoria but it is a no-sale in those many areas of the world which give rise to Islamism and its armed twin, jihadism.

However the emphasis on the "God Gap" does require that we Americans and our European cousins both think about and talk about just what it is we believe in, just what moves us, just what our collective aspirations might be. Do our fundamental predicates transcend the purely material, the transitory fulfillment of today's needs and desires? What verities do we subscribe to, promote, stand for?

If nothing else the Chicago Council's paper may cause some thinking in and around the Oval as to what and whom we are fighting. More, some thinking as to just what we are fighting for beyond keeping our country safe from the jihadists.

At the very least the paper might cause the Nice Young Man From Chicago to go beyond the glittering generalities and distortions of history which marked his Cairo address last year and put forth a clear picture of what we Americans are for--and against. This is critical even if when all is said God is conspicuous by absence.

A Primitive And Unconstructive People

It is small wonder that the Islamist jihadists (as well as the less violently inclined sympathizers and supporters who profess and practice politically oriented Islam) see the Arabian Peninsula of twelve hundred or so years ago as the desired paradigm of the human condition. These people and the societies which produce them are--like their desideratum--both primitive and unconstructive.

When the famed American diplomat and historian, George Kennan first used the term, "primitive and unconstructive," he was referring to a particular stance taken by the Soviet Union of Joe Stalin's day. As a man both knowledgeable of and sympathetic with Russian culture over its vast sweep of time, Kennan never would have applied the term to the entirety of the Russian population no matter how appropriate it might have been with respect to the Soviet strongman.

Faced with the actions and words of Islamist jihadists as well as the never ending paeans sung by the political Islamists to the glorious past of Islam during and after the life of the Perfect Man, Kennan would have been tempted to use the term to apply to an entire people. Or at least a significant component of that people.

Consider for a second the social and cultural nature of the assorted heartlands and havens of Islamist jihadism: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia. All of these geographical expressions (as well as others less closely associated with al-Qaeda or Taliban or al-Shabaab or any of the other multiplying forces of jihad) are essentially tribal. Rulership is based on what anthropologists formerly (in less sensitive times) termed "the mighty man" or the "strongman." Socially and culturally all are disconnected from the streams of change running elsewhere in the world except to exploit those technological developments of use to them from cell phones and laptops to liquid explosives and automatic weapons.

To put the matter bluntly, the places which have given birth and later succor to the jihadists and the political Islamists who cozen and control them are as primitive as the society and culture which existed on the Arabian Peninsula over a thousand years ago. The historical record shows that the legacy of the long dead Muslims of the Peninsula as well as their successors along the roads of war and conquest has been marked by a singular lack of a constructive orientation.

Despite the best efforts of Muslim apologists, the historical record demonstrates beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt that the world today owes very, very little to the creative minds, the productive imaginations of Muslims over the past millennium or so beyond providing sanctuary for Jewish intellects fleeing the mindless repression of the Catholics in Europe particularly Spain.

Developments which have marked the construction of the modern world emerged not from those standing in awe of the Perfect Man and the Companions but those who either bowed to the Cross, contemplated the Buddah, or eschewed religion all together. Europe, North America, and Asia were and are the founts of constructive developments in all fields of human discourse. This is what irks the adherents of the primitive and unconstructive views propounded by Islamist jihadists.

For more than a thousand years the tribally based Muslim religion throughout its great swath of territory from Morocco to Indonesia has done nothing to advance the human condition. And, the march of Islam from its cradle to its current extent has seen far more bloodshed, far more persecution, far more destruction than that inflicted by the long conflicts between varieties of European Christians or between Christians and Muslims.

Only in the colonial sphere can the record of Christians descend to the valleys of devastation which mark the course of Islamic conquest and exploitation. Even in this worst of all Christian campaigns it must be said with honesty that the Europeans did try to create, did try to repair damage, did try to improve in many ways the human condition in the regions they seized. Yes, often the attempts were futile, often they were misguided, occasionally the attempts were both cynical and self-serving. Nonetheless, the balance shows the Christian's did make a good faith effort to bring sophistication in politics, medicine, law, technology, education, social mores, and cultural customs.

The Muslims did none of these things. Societies and polities remained simple, primitive, under the sway of "mighty men" and backward looking clerics. Until challenged, dominated by the West, the lands and people of Islam existed in an eddy of time, motionless as the larger currents of change, innovation, discovery, accomplishment swirled by.

The Islamists and those in Islam who support them either openly or tacitly want to regain the safety of their little motionless warp in time. Worse, they want to stop the currents of change.

There is a deceptive appeal in the simple. The simple life, the closely ordered life, the life which runs according to timeless principles enshrined by both the sacred literature and tradition seems so attractive because it reduces the risks of life, the perils of existence, the messy uncertainties of change. A strong, pure faith backed by a strong "mighty man" has great seductive power--particularly to those who have never left the world of the personal, the tribal, the ever-so-simple.

Even to some living in far more politically, socially, culturally, and technologically sophisticated places than the FATA of Pakistan or the barren hills of Yemen find a sweet, sentimental appeal in the notion of a simplified life in which the never ending dislocations of "progress" are noted by their absence. The human brain molded by its emergence in a simple society of family and tribe, an existence which was as timeless as the rhythm of the seasons and the movements of game, still homes in on the "simple life" as a compass needle seeks True North.

The Islamists and their armed jihadist component want to bring back the Good Old Days by force, violence, and fear. They will continue their efforts unless killed to the last man--an option which is not practical in any sort of real world terms even if it could be ethically justified--from one tribal venue or another. The most rational option available for a long term defeat of the jihadists is the ending of tribalism in those places where it and Islam coexist.

That option looked at objectively is very, very difficult to achieve. It is so not because it would take great amounts of thought, effort, and money. The detribalization of the Muslim world is difficult, not to say impossible, to achieve because the simple life is "primitive and unconstructive." It is in that reality that the appeal resides.

Never Argue Religion and Politics?

Way back in the mythical "good old days" when Ike was in the White House the Geek was repeatedly and strictly told never to argue religion and politics as to do such was to commit a grave social faux pas. By crossing this line of good conduct, the Geek would be assured of becoming a social outcast, shunned by polite people.

The Geek ignored the well-intended guidance, going ahead and arguing in the forbidden zones. He found quickly that his interlocutors rapidly became both frustrated and aggravated. The Geek spent some his adolescent years wondering why. Differences in view, he naively believed, should be welcomed. They provided diversion, the pleasure of give-and-take, allowed time to pass enjoyably and (sometimes) profitably.

After awhile the big fist of realisation hit him.

The real reason it is difficult--even impossible--to argue about religion and politics is that both subjects tend to be rooted deeply in pure emotion. And, arguing emotion is a working definition of futility.

It is probably equally futile to argue the one of the most important issues of the present time.

That issue?

Simple.

Religion in politics. To state the proposition less inaccurately: religion is politics.

No. The Geek doesn't simply mean the incessant "god talk" that blathered ad nauseum during the presidential primary campaign.

(That phenomenon bothered the Geek. Like Thomas Jefferson, the Geek holds the view that a person's religions convictions (if any) are a matter even more private than that person's sexual preferences and peccadilloes.)

The monotheistic religions are political in nature. The jefes within each, regardless of their job titles or the precise organisation of the hierarchy (if any), seek to exercise power over the perceptions, beliefs and actions of the membership.

Regulations--laws--concerning the most intimate of behaviors such as sex, eating and cleanliness provide a powerful means of controlling a population. Particularly if the laws are backed by the force of deity. The hope of everlasting pleasurable reward for obeying the authority of the faith. The fear of eternal punishment if that authority is flouted.

It is not surprising that at least two of the monotheistic faiths have spent much time, effort and blood acquiring, maintaining and expanding authority over, not simply the personal morality of people, but full-fledged power over all aspects of life and land.

For a thousand years and more the Catholic Church sought total, unchallenged temporal power in Europe. Using the supposed power of the Bishop of Rome to "bind and loose" souls as a potent adjunct to more conventional forms of diplomacy, the Church exercised powerful sway over the European continent and its inhabitants.

The Church and ambitious emergent secular rulers attempted to extend control over the Mideast--the Crusades--and the New World. The success of the enterprise was, at best, mixed. Ultimately it failed. Foundering under the gales of change that came in the wake of both the Crusades and the invasion of the Western Hemisphere.

Protestant churches were no better in avoiding the temptation to combine spiritual and temporal power. The Church of England was a major prop of the centralising British monarchy. Lutheranism allowed princes of the German states to define themselves and their territories. Calvin went for a theocracy in Geneva. In all cases success was, at best, mixed and transient.

Throughout all these attempts at unchallenged political dominance by one church or another, one factor remains constant. Blood flowed. A lot of blood. On the battlefield. From the assassin's knife. In the torture chambers. Blood ran long and deep.

The authors of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution were well aware of this history. They were close to much of it in time. The potential harm of religion as politics compelled them to reject an identifiably religious, an identifiably Christian base to the new American Republic.

At the time, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and the others were excoriated for not including a specific reference to Jesus Christ or Christianity in either of the two documents which founded the United States of America. In recent years members of the Christian right wing in this country have done the same.

(Actually, they've gone miles beyond mere criticism. They have distorted history and belief, tried to mug Jefferson into agreement with their view that the US is and always has been a Christian nation.)

While there is no doubt that the values, belief systems and morality of several Protestant Christian denominations comprise a critical substrate of the American Experiment, it is as wrong as a cat barking to aver that the US and its government are or ever have been a Christian edifice.

The US faced a wave of hijackings and hostage-taking in the Mideast. Hoping to avoid expensive, prolonged and unpredictable war with the Muslim ruler whose personnel executed these acts of terrorism, the administration negotiated a treaty.

The treaty between the US and the Bey of Tripoli contained a very explicit statement, "(T)he government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion." This ringingly secular declaration was not included simply because it was true. It was incorporated in the treaty because the Bey maintained that he and his subjects had a religious duty to keep the infidels away.

Of course, that was a crock. The Bey and his pirates were in a money making enterprise. Not unlike the airlines a century and a half later who paid tribute to Fatah to assure that their planes wouldn't be hijacked or bombed, the Muslims of Tripoli were after the payoff. When the US didn't pay its ships were victimized. It's sailors enslaved.

The treaty didn't work for long either. Finally, the US had to use force. At first we did it poorly. We lost one of our best and newest warships to the pirates. Took heavy losses. Some congressmen bemoaned the administration's inept handling of affairs. Its unwillingness to talk more--even pay more.

Finally, we got the war right. We won. The Marines' Hymn got a line. The Bey backed down. Our ships sailed in peace. Without having to pay for the right.

Nearly two hundred years ago our Muslim enemies attempted to shield the nature of their actions behind the dictates of religious obligation. We didn't play that game. We specifically denied that our government was Christian (or to use today's terminology so loved by the jihadists, "Crusader.")

We tried to talk. We tried to pay. When those didn't work, we tried fighting as a last resort. We fought poorly. Lost at first. Learned as we went. Won. End of story.

As the Geek has contended in previous posts, Islam is not a religion. It is what it always has been. An expansionist political vision cloaked in visions of religion. Politics and religion are inseparable in the Quran, the hidith, in all other Muslim writings.

A Muslim can take the expansionist trajectory of Islamic political doctrine or leave it. That choice is his. (The Geek uses the male pronoun intentionally. As one of the hidith makes clear, "Paradise for a woman is under a man's boot," only men matter.)

The US and other western, secular, liberal democracies must make it clear that in the conflict--no--the war between it and the Islamists/jihadists, we understand the nature and character of our enemy. The enemy is the stark, harsh, primitive political movement from the badlands of the Arabian Peninsula.

Sensitivity in pursuit of victory in this war is only legitimate as a tactic. Political correctness that prohibits accurately describing our opponent is not justified.

Arguably, the well-intended but hopelessly misguided effort to refrain from giving our enemy "legitimacy" by using terms such as "jihadist" or "Islamist" or "Islamic terrorist" is defeating its own goal. By being so, so sensitive we are giving the enemy the very legitimacy we hope not to.

By retracting from rhetorical honesty we are giving the enemy the same hope we did when we cut and ran from Somalia following the death of a handful of Rangers and Special Forces in an ineptly planned and executed raid.

Our enemy in the current war(s) is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not the poverty of so many people in the Muslim countries. It is not even the 1.5 giga-Muslims per se.

(It must be recalled that each Muslim has the right, even the duty, to interpret the religion for himself. He need not listen and heed thoughtlessly the urgings of some cleric or another.)

Our enemy is the most death oriented, most harshly primitive versions of Islam incorporated in Salifism and Wahhibism. It is those Muslims who listen to the call of blood, death and unforgiving, indiscriminate acts of murder. It is those Muslims who act as apologists for the killers or who seek to subvert the will and ability of those who oppose the perpetrators of homicide.

Our enemy is those Muslims who, like the Bey of Tripoli and his ilk, harmed us and those like us while wrapped in the pages of the Quran.

It is not Islamophobia to know your enemy and to let him know that you know him. It's called being honest.