Obama’s Ramadan Pandering

By Robert Spencer
Jihad Watch

Ramadan didn’t fall around Christmas time this year, but Barack Obama came bearing gifts anyway. At an Iftar dinner Friday night at the White House (the third night of Ramadan), Obama endorsed the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero.

In doing so, he was in effect saying that Muslims could build a triumphal mosque marking Islam’s superiority and victory — which is how the Ground Zero mosque will be viewed in the Islamic world — and can lie about their funding (as Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has done), and lie about their commitment to interreligious dialogue and harmony (as Rauf has also done), and refuse to denounce jihad terrorists (as Rauf has refused to denounce Hamas), and all that is just fine with the President of the United States.

For Obama, it’s all about religious freedom. Apparently now the principle of religious freedom now gives religious groups an absolute right to build anything anywhere. Expect Shinto revivalists to build a shrine to the kamikazes at Pearl Harbor any day now, and self-proclaimed Christian Ku Klux Klansmen to build a chapel honoring the Confederate dead at the site of the murder of Martin Luther King. It’s religious freedom! It’s the American way!

Obama brought more goodies for Muslims in the U.S. and around the world in his Ramadan message this year. In it, he claimed that during Ramadan Muslims “provide support to others to advance opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere.”

Oh, really?

When have past Ramadans ever resulted in any advancement of “opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere,” Mr. President? In reality, it’s against Islamic law to give zakat, the almsgiving that is one of the pillars of Islam and is required of every Muslim, to non-Muslims.

That’s why Western governmental agencies and Christian charities build and staff schools and hospitals in impoverished parts of Africa and Asia, but oil-rich Muslim countries have never undertaken similar endeavors. With the sharp divide in Islam between believers and unbelievers, such that Muslims are commanded to be “merciful to one another, but ruthless to the unbelievers” (Koran 48:29), there is no basis in Islamic law for the idea that Islam fosters the advance of “opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere.”

Obama also said that Ramadan’s rituals of fasting and prayer “remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.”

It would be kind of him to explain how the Koran’s designation of non-Muslims as “the most vile of created beings” (98:6) advances human dignity, much less tolerance or justice. The Koran’s command that Muslims must fight against Jews and Christians until they pay a religion-based poll tax, jizya, “with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (9:29) likewise militates against the idea of universal human dignity that Obama professes to have discovered in Islam.

“And here in the United States,” Obama continued, “Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”

Islam has always been a part of America? Really? Will Obama provide us with a list of the Muslim Founding Fathers, the Muslim heroes of the American Revolution, the names of the Muslims killed fighting in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II — surely the President will have no trouble coming up with all that, will he? And he could also throw in a list of those “extraordinary contributions” that Muslims have made to our country. Aside from being the impetus for some extraordinary innovations in airport security, I can’t think of any. But I'm sure Barack Obama must be way ahead of me.

And so for this Ramadan, Barack Obama gave U.S. Muslims a grand mosque at Ground Zero, and an American pedigree as sterling and impeachable as his own. Will this be enough to stop the jihad against the U.S.? Smarter bets would instead be on its growing bolder than ever.

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