These days no one, especially New York Senator Hillary Clinton, can deny the charismatic magnitude of Democratic front runner Barack Obama. Watching him on television one cannot help but be drawn into the passion of his presentation. His commanding voice, reminiscent of WWE superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, is a welcome relief after several years of the bumbling oratory of President George W. Bush. Americans, for a variety of reasons, appreciate this man’s polished presentation whether they like his politics or not. Many are so enraptured by his presence that they are willing to swear allegiance to this elections “change” candidate while ignoring the fact that Mr. Obama really isn’t saying much of anything at all.
Perhaps the most important issue of this age is America’s role in the war on terror. Those who wish to place Barack Obama in the White House suggest that he is in a unique position to mediate the war on terror because he was, for a time, influenced by Islam as a child. They contend that as president, Obama may, through his unique perspective of Islam, be able to finally devise a US foreign policy that will respect our enemies and put an end to the seemingly endless cycle of violence emanating from the Middle East. Detractors would profess that Barack Obama’s followers are consumed by hopelessness and fear, that they are drawn into Obama’s cult of personality. And still there are others who would condemn Barack Obama because he has abandoned the “Truth” and taken up the faith of the infidels. All of these views deserve thoughtful consideration but only one requires a degree of caution - Islam.
Comfortable in their ala carte society, Americans largely dismiss Islam as just another belief system. But to more than a billion people worldwide Islam, which literally translates to “submission” in English, is much more. To its believers Islam provides religious doctrine, societal law, and a strict code of personal conduct. The demands of fidelity imposed by Islam on its followers has compelled some fathers to strangle their daughters because they refuse obscure themselves by wearing a hajib, a traditional Muslim headscarf, in Western non-Muslim societies, while numerous others have detonated their children in marketplaces or on crowded busses as a kind of automatic entry fee to Islamic heaven. Yet Islam is still considered respectable in America’s blissfully naive multicultural mindset.
President Bush and many others constantly refer to Islam as a “religion is peace.” But this declaration is belied by those who dared to seriously question the world’s second largest religion. Just ask Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Theo Van Gogh, or the cartoonist from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Po about Islam’s tolerance, objectivity, or passivity. Those who question, criticize, or seek to change Islam from within find themselves either in perpetual hiding to avoid being murdered by a religious decree (called a Fatwa) or, in the case of Theo Van Gogh, murdered on a public street with witnesses.
The past fifty years is littered with instances of Islamic terrorism across the globe. The world has witnessed the execution of Israeli Olympians in Munich Germany, numerous embassy bombings in many nations, the Achille Louro hijacking, discotheque bombings in Germany, the Lockerbie airliner bombing, televised beheadings, and the murder of thousands of Americans in New York City’s World Trade Center. If any culture has demanded violent confrontation it is the culture of Islam.
There are precious few points to Obama’s campaign that one can identify outside of his unrelenting ability to point out that change is needed. One point that clearly stands out is his call to pull American troops from Iraq in 2009. To this his sheeple, pumped full of several years of fallacious DNC inspired fear and national self-loathing, bellow and faint without ever contemplating the destiny of docile, unquestioning sheep.
Decades before America retaliated for the murders of those in the World Trade Center in 2001 Islamic clerics vented their utter contempt for the American way of life in Mosques and schools in Saudi Arabia, in Somalia, and in Brooklyn, NY. Yet there are still many Americans who refuse to believe that the doctrines these Islamic holy men expound are anything more than rhetoric of a minority group within a generally peaceful and tolerant religion.
Osama bin Laden, a devout Sharia Muslim, expressed his desire to terrorize the United States and its people long before many in the United States government ever realized who he was or what he was fully capable of. Terror, in his estimation, is to be conducted against military personnel and civilians alike without differentiation. Al Qaeda (bin Laden’s followers) have been fed the idea that Americans, due to their love of life, despite their overwhelming firepower and numbers, do not have the tenacity to win a war against the methods that he and his followers employ. Repeatedly he teaches his minions that Americans will flee from battle if the carnage they inflict is too great, even if inflicted on a relative few. Sadly Osama bin Laden’s teachings have been reinforced by President Reagan’s withdrawal from Beirut in 1984, President Clinton’s half-hearted fiasco in Mogadishu in 1992, President Clinton’s desire to do nothing after numerous embassy bombings throughout the 1990’s, and the World Trade Center bombing in 1994. But it was only after the American public experienced terror in a very personal and unavoidable way on the morning of September 11th 2001 that she finally decided to retaliate.
Oddly enough Presidential front runner Barack Hussein Obama is seeking to once again to validate, embolden, and encourage the followers of Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist groups by removing our soldiers from a battlefield where we have never known defeat. Worse still hundreds of thousands of craven unthinking Americans are more than willing to allow Obama-mania to permit Americas enemies to survive another day, replenish their strength, and strategize again how best to harm the United States.
Osam…err… Obama in 2009, indeed. God help us.
