In my post ‘A Rick Blaine Moment’ I wondered why Hope ‘n Change would pick Abu Abbas for his first foreign phone call – and why he would give that first television interview to Al-Arabiya.
As I read the transcript of the Al-Arabiya interview, however, I was tempted to open the Scotch bottle for a little drunken rumination of my own. Here are some of the highlights in what can only be described as a dreadful interview:
And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating — in the past on some of these issues — and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen. He’s going to be speaking to all the major parties involved. And he will then report back to me. From there we will formulate a specific response.
Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions. But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.
Here, Hope ‘n Change displays typical leftist equivalence – that Israel and the killers who seek to destroy it are on equal moral footing. Here’s a suggestion: how about starting out with a frank recognition of Israel’s right to exist – which the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah still refuse to admit.
Q: Will the United States ever live with a nuclear Iran? And if not, how far are you going in the direction of preventing it?
OBAMA: You know, I said during the campaign that it is very important for us to make sure that we are using all the tools of U.S. power, including diplomacy, in our relationship with Iran.
Now, the Iranian people are a great people, and Persian civilization is a great civilization. Iran has acted in ways that’s not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past — none of these things have been helpful.
But I do think that it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress. And we will over the next several months be laying out our general framework and approach. And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.
This is serious. He avoids the question and puts diplomacy front and center – and thereby marks himself off as a soft touch to the Iranians, who’ve already sized him up as Jimmy Carter II. Note that the Iranian response has been to call Hope ‘n Change ‘weak’ and to set minor preconditions of their own for a diplomatic meeting – like, the U.S. should get out of the Middle East and abandon Israel. Uh huh.
But here’s the real knee-slapper:
And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.
America had respect and a partnership with the Muslim world ‘as recently as 20 or 30 years ago’? This type of amnesia is what you get when you elect callow and naive men to positions of responsibility. The truth is that we’ve never had a particularly respectful attitude toward the Muslim world and there’s certainly never been a partnership – only a commercial interest since oil was discovered in Middle East in the 1930s.
Fact: we fought our first foreign war as a nation against the Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast who were seizing our ships and enslaving our countrymen – acts that are condoned by Islam. Our attitudes toward Islam are pretty much those expressed by Tocqueville when he compared the democratic compatibility of Islam and Christianity:
Mohammed professed to derive from Heaven, and has inserted in the Koran, not only religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The Gospel, on the contrary, speaks only of the general relations of men to God and to each other, beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, while the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.
How is it that a 19th century Frenchman understands the theological issues better than we seem to?
More to the point, how can Hope ‘n Change posit a ‘golden age’ of American-Muslim relations a mere 20 or 30 years ago? Let’s see, 20 years ago we were dealing with Libyan and Palestinian terrorism throughout the world. 30 years ago we were dealing the Iran hostage crisis – during the golden age of the Carter Administration.
Does this guy really know what he’s talking about? Don’t answer that.
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