Peter Smith

The Guilt-Edged Presidency

obama bowsDon’t keep too calm. Be, at least, somewhat alarmed. A feckless post-modernist (at best) is in the White House and medieval barbarians are at the gate. Make no mistake of underestimating the threat.

We face an implacable, religiously-inspired foe. There are Islamic terrorist militias stretching from North Africa, across the Middle East, to Asia and down to South East Asia, with growing fifth columns in all Western countries. Only the United States is capable of bringing to bear the moral authority, the leadership, the resources and the manpower to defeat them. And right now the Commander in Chief is fiddling away while urging us to remember the sins of our ancestors.

Apparently Christians must remember the Crusades and the Inquisition before being critical of ISIS. And, presumably, using the same logic, Churchill should have been mindful of Cromwell’s transgressions before taking on Hitler. FDR should have brought the treatment of American Indians into his calculations before responding to Tojo. If you can’t get to grips with that; if it confounds you, then join the club of the level-headed.

Hard on the heels of the United Nations carrying reports of children being beheaded, crucified and buried alive by ISIS, and the Jordanian pilot (Muath al-Kaseasbeh) being burnt to death in a cage, President Obama said this at the annual National Prayer Breakfast on February 5.

Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. So it is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.

How offensive can you possibly be to innocent people, including many Christians, being brutalised, raped, enslaved and killed today? Just when you think President Obama’s foreign policy is as inept as it is ever likely to get, he shows that he has fresh depths to plumb. Imagine what the Jordanians think of his high school-level thesis on the moral equivalence of the Inquisitors and ISIS. Imagine what any of America’s allies think of it. Only ISIS will find comfort in being compared in their brutality with the infidel Crusaders.

The accuracy and balance of Obama’s sense of history is extremely suspect. For example, he might just once want to acknowledge that the Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression and conquest; and that Christianity was primarily responsible for getting rid of slavery — for which Muslims, as slavers and slave traders, bore most responsibility from the seventh century onwards. But this aside, what in the world has the happenings of so long ago to do with what is happening now? What point is he trying to make?

He was not elected as chief apologist for Islam; despite his paternity. No one cares whether Christians, Hindus, Jews, Confucians, Sikhs, or Zoroastrians committed foul deeds in the distant past. Islamists are committing them egregiously and everywhere in the present.

Obama invited fifteen Muslim leaders to the White House on Wednesday, the day before he delivered his National Prayer Breakfast speech. Tellingly, the names of those invited have not yet been revealed. Whoever they were, and whatever their real agenda, it would be nice to think that most of the conversation was about the maimed, abused and murdered victims of Islamists and what to do about it. What we can be sure of is that Islamophobia bulked large in the conversation. It was reported, for example, that Obama affirmed ‘his administration’s commitment to safeguarding civil rights through hate crimes prosecutions and civil enforcement actions’.

It is quite simply mind-boggling that anything connecting Islam with extremism or terrorism won’t pass his lips. Hence his upcoming: ‘White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism’. What’s that Mr President, have those Baptists been at it again?

I want to go back to Churchill, though I think Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or, in fact, almost any previous American or UK leader would serve. Is it possible to imagine any of them giving comfort to the enemy and confounding allies by dwelling on national mea culpas for real and/or confected past sins? Is it possible to imagine them refusing to name the enemy in case it caused offence?

Two more years of this presidency gives a lot more time for the Iranians to build a bomb, for ISIS and their fellow travellers to spread their tentacles, and for the further internal enfeeblement of our peerless Judeo-Christian values. Times are tough. Our leaders are weak. And the one who should be the strongest is the weakest.

‘Cometh the moment cometh the man’, so it is said. No-one is yet in sight. Hopefully, the next US President will, at the very least, live in the here-and-now and be unmistakably patriotic.

5 thoughts on “The Guilt-Edged Presidency

  • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

    Hearty congratulations yet again, Peter Smith! Without doubt, Obama is a despicable traitor to the US and to the West in general, and he will go down as such in history. Considering his origins and early life, it is just about natural that he’d be sympathetic to Islam. What is unforgivable is that he insists on presenting himself as a patriotic American, and what is alarming is that a sizable proportion of Americans seem to accept that. God bless America, indeed!

    Bill Martin.

  • denandsel@optusnet.com.au says:

    Another very good article Peter, and timely.
    The last dark ages was actually caused by Islam trying to spread its influence into western Europe, although the leftist re-writing of history has tried [unfortunately successfully in many cases] to place the blame on Christianity. Islam has only ever been spread by the sword or by guns. Even now it must still be opposed by force, but it can only be successfully stopped by intellectual means. This will be difficult because leftists love totalitarians, that is why they support Islam at the expense of the West and Israel, and unfortunately freedom loving people aren’t very good at intellectual ‘fights’. To be considered an intellectual now it is almost mandatory to have leftist views.
    It has been reported that Tony Abbott is considering introducing new terrorist laws or strengthening some of the older ones in our fight for civilisation. We don’t need new legislation, we just need existing sensible laws to be ENFORCED. Also some of the older bits of useless legislation should go. 18C must be repealed. I want to be able to criticise the barbaric actions of some of the followers of Islam without having to risk being brought before a court presided over by a Mordi Bromberg or a Gillian Triggs. The only other change needed is that of media attitudes. Much of the MSM and social media seem to have made ‘Islamophobia’ a far bigger ‘crime’ than beheading an infidel or cutting off the clitoris of some young girl. When merely expressing an unfavourable opinion about some Islamic practices is routinely and loudly proclaimed as Islamophobic by the ABC and the twitterati, civilisation really is at risk.

  • prsmith14@gmail.com says:

    Thanks for your kind comments Bill and ‘denandsel’. Unfortunately, when you listen to some Muslim leading lights in the US, in the UK, in Australia and elsewhere in the West we may well be erring in the direction of understating the problem. Obama was also quoted recently as saying that 99.9 per cent of Muslims are sort of like us. No they are not. Survey after survey shows a high degree of intolerance among Muslim populations. And, of course, as we all know, unless the moderate and peaceful are in the overwhelming majority they will have no say when the radical imams take over. The problem is not innate to people who happen to be born Muslims. It is innate to the religion. Following Muhammad’s example means lots of looting and killing; not to mentioning marrying a six-year old (consummation thoughtfully was delayed until she was nine). A figure of peace he just ain’t. The so-called radical imams are right. And that’s the problem. Peter

  • jenkins says:

    Everyone has ancestral blood on their hands, but probably none more so than the current inhabitants of the middle east if the prevailing “out of Africa” theory of migration is correct.

  • pgang says:

    I’ve been listening to Churchill’s memoirs on the political climate prior to WW2. It is eerily familiar. His personal choice of name for the war was ‘The Unnecessary War’. We might be heading towards something similar.

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