By Stan Goodenough, Jerusalem Newswire
President George W. Bush made the first critical mistake when – in an effort to prevent a backlash against peaceful American Muslims – he moved quickly after 9-11 to stress that the enemy that had perpetrated the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor was not “Islam” but “radical Islam.”
The enemy, the former president insisted – against all the available historical evidence – was not the religion. “Islam is a religion of peace.”
Bush’s effort to walk the politically acceptable walk was picked up and pushed to the limit by the other nations of the world (almost all of them Bush-hating), and especially by the Islamic ones.
But even as they applauded his reluctance to call a spade a Muslim (while despising him for it), the Islamic states – most of which actively and ardently support Islamic terrorist organizations – never imagined that the NEXT American president would let the Islamic world – which is involved in almost every conflict on the globe today – completely off the hook.
But that is what Barack Obama has decided to do – according to widely and wildly circulating press reports Wednesday.
As the Associated Press had it:
“President Barack Obama’s advisers will remove religious terms such as “Islamic extremism” from the central document outlining the US national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror…
“The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”
“… rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on US foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.”
Not only are Muslims not the cause/source of most terrorism. Neither, in the view of the Obama administration, are radical Muslims.
Where, then does this leave us – apart from with an even stronger suspicion than we have had up till now that Obama himself prays to Allah in his closet?
For Israel – the hundreds of millions of Muslims who surround this little country and seek its destruction – the enemy has just become nameless.
And those calling America the “great Satan” are no longer Islamic radicals. I guess they are just misguided individuals – errant members of the great global village; the international community of nations.
Their religion – whose founder was himself a terrorist and which demands from every one of its adherents a commitment to jihad – holy war; is really not the issue at all.
Is it?
