In an article about how Obama must kowtow to Muslims, several things leap out at me, but this paragraph most of all:
If Obama wants to rally Muslim support to rein in Iran, analysts say, he will have to prove his good intentions elsewhere. In particular, he needs to move to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands the Palestinians want for a state.
The Gaza Strip has had no Israeli residents in it for nearly four years. How long will it take to get AP’s writers and editors to stop writing that it is occupied?
The other graf:
After the Bush years, one of the darkest periods in U.S.-Muslim relations, there is now a chance for reconciliation, said Shibley Telhami, a Mideast scholar at the University of Maryland who conducts annual public opinion surveys around the Middle East.
Huh. One of the darkest periods in U.S.-Muslim relations? Darker, even, than the Iranian hostage crisis in the 70s? Than the murder of hundreds of Marines in Lebanon in the 80s? The first WTC terror attack on American soil in the 90s?
And why exactly would the Bush years be a “dark” period for U.S.-Muslim relations? Could it be, perhaps, the thousands murdered on 9/11 by Muslim terrorists that may have made us think that Muslims had a problem with the U.S.?
What I tire of in all of these analyses is that explicit angle that somehow, the U.S. is at fault for Muslims that hate us, instead of radical Islam raising these people to believe that they can get their way through murder and jihad. And of course, there is always the Israel angle. They hate us, you see, because we favor the lone democracy in the Middle East.
And there is doubt the U.S. president can change entrenched foreign policy, particularly what is perceived in the Muslim world as Washington’s pro-Israeli bias. What Muslims see as America’s repeated failure to hold Israel to its international obligations is a sore point. A construction freeze in Israeli West Bank settlements – Obama wants it, Israel rejects it – is shaping up as a major test.
Not to worry. The pro-Israel bias of the administration seems to be lessening daily. Obama will not be visiting Israel on this trip. Egypt, yes. Saudi Arabia, yes. But not Israel.
And the AP is also following the media narrative:
The president’s initial actions have earned him good will. He’s reached out to Muslims in an interview with an Arab satellite TV station, in video message to Iranians on the Persian new year and in a speech to the Turkish parliament. He ordered Guantanamo prison closed within a year and said the U.S. would not engage in torture, reversing two Bush policies seen here as having targeted Muslims.
He’s not closing Guantanamo, and he’s reserved the right to use tactics like waterboarding if the situation demands it. But let’s pretend he reversed the Bush policies and just not use our objective reporting skills, shall we?
The article is titled “Muslims want tangible change on Mideast from Obama”. You know what? I want to see tangible change from Muslims. I want to see an end to the kleptocracies. I want to see an end to “honor” killings. I want to see women granted equal rights in all Islamic nations. I want to see religions other than Islam allowed the same freedoms in Muslim nations as Islam is allowed here in the U.S. I want to see Muslims own up to the terrorists in their religion and stop excusing them as justified. And I want to see an end to Muslim nations calling for Sharia all over the world.
Think I’ll get even a fraction of those demands?
Of course not.
Think Obama will kowtow to Muslim demands?
He is already.
If the darkest time for American-Muslim relations was when Americans liberated 40 million Muslims from tyranny and brutal dictatorship, I think the clowns who say things like that are not going to like what happens when American-Muslim relations “improve”.
Like you, Meryl, I an tired of hearing the inane gripes of Muslims, and the continual insistance that if we don’t cooperate in their genocidal intent against the Jews they will all be against us. If Muslims continue to demand Israel’s destruction and the genocide of its Jews somebody might say one day “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Let’s see if we can do to you what you have wanted to do to the Jews.”
On 9/11 a friend of mine was working with consultants at his office. One of them was from India. The Indian commented on the events of the day, that soon Kali would begin to move west. One of the reasons for the Bush strategy, and one of the reasons I supported it, was to stamp out this jihad nonsense before Kali started to move. Muslims had better hope Bush’s strategy works even without him, and had better work their little tails off to make it succeed, because the rivers of blood Kali will shed will be mostly Muslim.