Timothy Furnish: A Nobel Prize...for Ignorance of Islam?

Fish Modified by Mister Ghost - 2005

Timothy Furnish at the excellent The History News Network takes apart President Barack Obama's ignorance, willful or not, of Islam.

As I and other commentators (Ray Ibrahim, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, among others) have pointed out numerous times, those who perpetrate violence in the name of Islam and Muhammad are in no wise “distorting” or “defiling” the world’s second-largest religion—they are, rather, simply taking literally the violence enshrined in the Qur’an and emulating the historical example of Muhammad himself.

President’s Obama’s Nobel-acceptance speech yesterday was an impressive oration and a welcome departure from his usual habit of paying penance for every real or perceived sin in the history of American foreign policy. But like the Liberty Bell with its disfiguring crack, or the Sphinx missing a nose, the overall excellence of the speech—by the first sitting U.S. President since Woodrow Wilson to win a Nobel prize—was fatally flawed by his ignorance, willful or not, of Islam.
Obama implicitly, but wisely, conceded to critics by opening his address acknowledging the thinness of the rationale for his receiving the Nobel peace prize—“compared to…Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela, my accomplishments are slight”—and continued by standing up for the employment of American force: “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” Most directly confronting one of the Right’s major charges against him, the President finally managed to say “evil does exist in the world” and that “war is sometimes necessary.” Obama made it clear that Afghanistan was just such a a war and implied just as clearly that Iraq was not. And his “three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace”—truly tough sanctions for regimes that ignore international strictures (read: Iran), a recommitment to human rights and “economic security”—seem to have come straight out of an international relations textbook rather than any really new Obaman thinking on the issue for which he was receiving the world’s highest award.

Toward the end of his speech the President lapsed into banalities that bordered on intentional misrepresentations. His line about “those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam” has become boilerplate on the Left, invoked like a talisman every time Islam is mentioned. But it is nonetheless pure fantasy. As I and other commentators (Ray Ibrahim, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, among others) have pointed out numerous times, those who perpetrate violence in the name of Islam and Muhammad are in no wise “distorting” or “defiling” the world’s second-largest religion—they are, rather, simply taking literally the violence enshrined in the Qur’an and emulating the historical example of Muhammad himself. Obama then followed with the second axiom of American liberals when discussing Islam—be sure to adduce the Crusades: “these [Islamic] extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.” Why, yes they are, Mr. President. But there are thousands of years of human history preceding the Crusades, many also amply recorded, and wars in the name of God long pre-date what the medieval Catholic Christians did. In fact, one only has to go back a few hundred years prior to the First Crusade of the 11th century to see that Muslim armies violentl y overran Christian lands in Egypt, Anatolia, North Africa and Spain—all in the name of Allah. But of course Muslims and Islam can never be held to account, according to our President’s worldview, for their invocation of Allah to kill, conquer and enslave. Those depredations must have been carried out by just a few "extremists," no doubt embittered by something one of George Bush's ancestors had done. Cont...