05 June 2009
   
The Other Cheek

 
I don’t know quite what to make of it, do you?
 
This is so strange. Terra incognita. The President is in Cairo, and it was the major policy speech the President has been talking about since the endless campaign. It has come, and passed, and if you listened to the whole thing you heard all sorts of extraordinary things. You heard that Muslims builtAmerica’s tallest buildings, and won Nobel Prizes and a litany of interesting fun-facts.
 
It dawned on me that he was counting the Black Muslims as part of the global fellowship of faith, and that Muhammed Ali’s lighting of the Olympic Torch was a touchstone of pride for The Faith. I thought that is the sort of thinking that got Malcolm X shot down in Harlem, but I agree there are larger issues here that need to be addressed.
 
Some Sunnis consider Shias to be apostates, as the President well knows, and worthy of the sword.
 
I’m sure all the things Mr, since the President can afford fact-checkers for his written remarks, even if his cool off-the-cuff remarks are sometimes wildly off the mark. Mine are, too, so this is not a fulmination about whether America would be the second largest Muslim country if things were counted that way.
 
Of course he was thinking of Indonesia, where as he noted, he heard the call to prayers as a child. It is easy to get things out of order. We here would actually be tied in numbers with Khazakstan, or somewhere in the middle thirties in terms of the percentage of Muslim citizens.
 
I don’t mind his trying to change the image of America in the Muslim world. The bayonet has had mixed results, after all. He went on to say that he takes this issue quite seriously.
 
"I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.”
 
That is all good, and in a fifty-five minute speech, barely mentioned the global financial crash.
 
That is sort of a Muslim problem, too, or at least the problem of the Islamic governments whose oil wealth was sloshing all over the planet looking for sound investments in what had been the only real universal currency. The greed of those who created the intricate financial vehicles that crashed into the global highway abutment is only to be expected.
 
In the aftermath of the financial car-wreck, I suppose this makes sense, and I support the President’s game attempt to take at least one or two of the awful problems off the table. Two-and-a-half wars, all being conducted in Islamic states, are going to be a continuing irritant.
 
It certainly irritated Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a young man who also goes by he name of Carlos Bledsoe down in Little Rock this week.
 
That is part of the problem that has me scratching my head. Mr. Muhammed, a home-grown American who had some training in Yemen, was reportedly incensed at the treatment of his new co-religionists at the hands of the American military. He took the premeditated opportunity to shoot two Army recruiters, one of them to death.
 
I know it is exactly this sort of behavior that President Obama is trying to assuage, visiting with King Abdullah on the horse farm in Saudi Arabia, and addressing the Islamic World with his cool rhetoric in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt.
 
It makes me queasy this bold new world with our cool relativist President.
 
We ought to have a name for this new age. The Post-War period would have been good, but it’s been used already, and way prematurely. As it turns out, the President’s itinerary continues on from Egyptto Germany, and he is going to visit the site of a death camp. Nothing could be more symbolic, and is intended to assuage the fear in Jerusalem that he has forgotten what happened.
 
It was not so long ago that Protestants were slaughtering Catholics, and not so long before that when the Roman was putting the New World to the torch. But I am a creature of my time, and it is the Islamists who are the killers today.
 
I confess that It sticks in my craw that we are supposed to act like Christians and turn the other cheek.
 
It does not match my world experience to embrace those who would do us harm, and I am not much of a Christian anyway. But it is not my world any more, and maybe this will work.
 
It certainly couldn’t hurt, could it?
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com