Obama’s policies since he became President have revived suspicions that he is secretly a Muslim. He's not a Muslim. He's a naif. But so are a great many people in Washington. They are like high school kids who, when asked by an inquiring reporter what they intend to be, say with absolute conviction: "An astrophysicist." This despite not having any understanding of what kinds of study that would entail, and most of them are incapable of such study. The previous Administration ended up squandering money on the sentimental messianism of what metamorphosed into a Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project, where "freedom" would be brought to "ordinary moms and dads," in Bush's unforgettably comic formulation. “Freedom” was defined as mere head-counting at election time, not as a resulting advanced Western democracy with guarantees for minorities and solicitude for individual rights, and with the Shari'a as the ultimate authority -- the Shari'a that in letter and spirit contradicts the most important principles of advanced Western democracy.
Then the plan became something less ambitious, which was, and is: Iraq as a state that would remain unified, and even become prosperous. Why "unity" in Iraq is good for Infidels has never been explained. Nor has it ever been explained why Iraq should not be seen as the ideal place in which to observe, and do nothing to prevent, the pre-existing sectarian fissure between Sunni and Shia from widening, and having effects outside of Iraq (in Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Pakistan) and even drawing in, from outside, men, money and materiel from co-religionists on both sides.
And this business of making sure that Muslims should become "prosperous" because, you see, if they are poor they tend to sign up for the Taliban and such-like, would, as a policy, if continued, logically force the entire Infidel world to supply endless aid to all the Muslims who forgot to be born with oil and gas under their soil, and to do this forever and ever, lest they become...."dangerous." And, paradoxically, those who are truly poor, and have no rich relatives as the Muslim poor do, would see aid that might go to them go instead to Muslims, as a bribe to keep those Muslims from becoming...."dangerous." The confusion, the illogic, the sheer craziness of American policy is something we can't wait, alas, for sober historians to analyze and hold up for ridicule. We need to change that policy, now.
Obama is a naif, for what else could he be? He had a biological absentee father whom, he knows, was called a "Muslim." He does not know, apparently, that to be Muslim fifty years ago in Kenya meant, and means today, something very different from being, say, a Muslim from an Arab country, where ethnicity reinforces rather than plays against Islam. The easygoing syncretistic Islam of its practitioners in West Africa and East Africa may be under assault from the Saudi-financed true-blue Muslims who are attempting to engage in ideological epuration, and thus making Islam in sub-Saharan Africa ever more dangerous because ever more true to the real thing, undiluted by time and custom and distance from the Middle East's fanatics.
But to take this, or to take Obama’s stay from the ages of 6 to 9 in a most atypical school in a fancy part of Jakarta four decades ago in Indonesia, as showing that he has some real knowledge of Islam, is even more naïve. Indonesia is the one Muslim state that was conquered not by Muslim warriors, but by traders from the Hadramaut who came to Java and established trading entrepots on the coasts. They then turned these into military centers, as was natural for Muslims, and then slowly expanded them, but in the main sought to win power through converting the leaders of Java and Sumatra, who then ordered their subjects to convert. And the continued presence of the monuments of the Hindu and Buddhist past, the pre-Islamic sites such as Borobudur, as with Persepolis in Iran, keep reminding people that they were not always Muslims, though of course the purest Muslims would just as soon raze to the ground any reminder of the pre-Islamic or non-Islamic elements in Indonesia.
Obama is a dab hand at presenting himself as thoughtful. He's a good speaker. But he keeps failing, and looking absurd, in the innocence, and arrogance, of such proposals as an "Islamic summit" where he, Barack Obama, would attend and presumably preside. He should try to exercise his imagination, and picture the reaction of sensible people to some Muslim leader claiming that, because he had, say, spent a few years as the son of a diplomat in London (or perhaps, like so many rich Gulf Arabs, gone to boarding school in London), he was going to call a "Christian summit" of leaders from countries in Western Europe and North America, and iron all those little differences and misunderstandings and misapprehensions out.
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