Obama's Islamophilia

Whatever happened to the liberals' constant railing about separation of church and state? Apparently, that does not include mosque and state, as our president is clearly not keeping religion out of his policy-making.

The $60 million question remains: Is Obama a closet Muslim? Who knows? It doesn't really matter because he is governing with Muslims' best interests in mind. One comment keeps coming back to me: "My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s younger half sister." Surely, brother Barry is part of that "whole family".

Read from the American Spectator:

The Obama Watch
Obama's Milky Way
By George Neumayr

"Barack Obama is not a Muslim, said Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign, adding slyly, 'as far as I know.' Reeling from losses that followed this whispering campaign, Obama denied its implication and faked up an eager interest in Christianity. 'I was sworn in with my hand on the family Bible,' he pouted.

But once safely ensconced in the presidency, he renewed his Islamophilia. Last year in Cairo, he tried to wow his audience by saying that he hails from 'generations of Muslims' and that he had marinated for 'several years' in Islamic Indonesia, where he 'heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk.'

By secularist standards, Obama's Islamophilia constitutes a blatant violation of Church and state. His presidency largely exists for the benefit of one religion, the only religion he appears to consider blameless and holy -- Islam, and not even its moderate variant.

Last October, the Washington Post ran an intriguing story about the U.S. government's unwillingness to help moderate Muslims lest that offend the hardline imams who actually run the religion. The story's title was, 'As Indonesia debates Islam's role, U.S. stays out: Post-9/11 push to boost moderates gives way,' and began with an anecdote about a scholar in the early 1980s seeking funds to promote moderate Islam who got rejected by a Ford Foundation employee.

'He left empty handed. The United States, he was told, was "not interested in getting into Islam,"' said the story. And who turned the moderate Muslim down? Barack Obama's mother. 'The rebuff came from President Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, a U.S. anthropologist who lived in Indonesia for more than a decade.' The story went on to say that today 'U.S. thinking has moved back toward what it was in Dunham's day: stay out of Islam.'

Except, that is, to praise it uncritically. Under Obama, America undercuts moderate Muslims while pandering to violent ones. We've seen during Obama's presidency self-identified Muslim terrorists shoot up a military base, try to blow up a plane over Detroit on the day of Jesus Christ's birth, and attempt to bomb tourists in Times Square. Yet U.S. attorney general Eric Holder refuses to identify radical Islam as a motive for terrorism and Obama security adviser John Brennan says jihad is a concept of self-improvement that Dr. Phil could endorse -- 'a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community.'

The Islamophilia of the Obama administration at this point is well beyond the parodies of The Onion. This week NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced that the space program has adopted a new mission -- to serve as a self-esteem project for global Islam. He informed a reporter with Al Jazeera that when he took the NASA job Obama made it clear to him that 'perhaps foremost he wanted to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering.'

So, apparently, radical Muslims who consider science intrinsically blasphemous are going to help us get to Mars once their egos are sufficiently massaged. Or perhaps Bolden is saying that NASA has become a kind of learning annex for the scientifically illiterate throughout the world. In any case, the comment is staggering. This is an administration which looks at terrorists and sees misguided peace activists, looks at radical imams who issue death edicts against scholars and sees budding space engineers.

Earth to Bolden and Barack: These imams don't 'feel good' about Islam's centuries-back contribution to science; they feel ashamed of it. As Robert R. Reilly chronicles in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, mainstream Islamic theology today views science as impious/useless because it presupposes that God created the world rationally, a presupposition which is an affront to God (under the twisted metaphysics of Islamic theology) since it is seen as a limitation on his freedom and transcendence.

'The catastrophic result of this view was the denial of the relationship between cause and effect in the natural order,' writes Reilly. 'In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali, who vehemently rejected Plato and Aristotle, insisted that God is not bound by any order and that there is, therefore, no "natural" sequence of cause and effect, as in fire burning cotton or, more colorfully, as in "purging of the bowels and the using of a purgative." Rather than a clear and binding relationship between cause and effect, there are merely juxtapositions of discrete events that make it appear that the fire is burning the cotton, but God could just as well do otherwise.'

This Islamic theology simply killed science in the Islamic world, which is illustrated by such basic measures as the paucity of patents and scientific books that come out of it. Yet these are the countries with which the Obama administration hopes to coordinate tricky space flights. And all the while, Obama casts himself as the head of a political party that alone appreciates 'science' and slanders Christians as hidebound opponents of it."