{"id":7889,"date":"2014-09-26T07:41:49","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T14:41:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7889"},"modified":"2014-09-26T07:41:49","modified_gmt":"2014-09-26T14:41:49","slug":"the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"The Incredible Lightness of Being Barack Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via FrontPage Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Barack Obama\u2019s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clich\u00e9s of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.<\/p>\n

First was the obligatory call \u201cto renew the purpose of the U.N.\u2019s founding,\u201d which apparently is \u201cto observe and enforce international norms,\u201d the most important being \u201cto ensure that no nation can subjugate its neighbors and claim their territory\u201d and to promote \u201cthe path of diplomacy and peace and the ideals this institution is designed to uphold.\u201d Such phrases are so common and uncritically received that we forget \u201cinternational norms\u201d do not exist. Different peoples have different \u201cnorms\u201d about, for example, the use of violence to achieve their aims. Nations will sign treaties that seemingly express our norms, but that doesn\u2019t mean they believe in\u00a0them. More often, such treaties are mere mechanisms for one nation to get what it wants from another. The sorry history of U.S. arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union and then Russia, treaties the Russians violated for decades to improve their nuclear arsenal at our expense, is just one example.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As for seizing territory by force, the U.N. did nothing to prevent Turkey from seizing northern Cyprus, or China from seizing Tibet, and more recently Russia from seizing Crimea. The Serbs\u2019 attempts in the \u201990s to \u201cclaim territory\u201d were stopped not by the U.N., but by American bombs. So too was Saddam Hussein\u2019s aggression against Kuwait. Nor should we be surprised at the serial failure of the U.N. to enforce its lofty founding principles. Nations belong to the U.N. because they think they can use it to advance their interests, not \u201cto enforce international norms,\u201d especially when their own \u201cnorms\u201d see nothing wrong with using duplicity and force to achieve their aims. Indeed, the continuing violence justified by other \u201cnorms\u201d since the U.N.\u2019s founding has claimed some 41 million lives. The U.N. serves the conflicting, zero-sum interests of the member states, not the \u201cpath of diplomacy and peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

From that preposterous beginning, the speech went downhill. \u201cIslam teaches peace,\u201d the President intoned. No, Islam teaches submission<\/i>. There is no peace for those who refuse to submit, even for Muslims considered heretics by other Muslims, but especially for \u201cpolytheists\u201d or \u201cinfidels.\u201d In their case, Islam teaches jihad against them if they refuse to accept the \u201ccall\u201d to convert. Far from being extremists \u201cwho have perverted one of the world\u2019s great religions,\u201d as Obama scolded, the proliferating jihadist outfits that are kidnapping, torturing, raping, beheading, and enslaving people around the globe are acting on the doctrines and past practices of Islam\u2019s founding fathers.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0Obama might think that their \u201cnightmarish vision . . . would divide the world into adherents and infidels,\u201d but it is traditional, orthodox Islam that divides the world into the dar al harb<\/i>, the \u201chouse of war\u201d against which the faithful must wage jihad, and the dar al islam<\/i>, the \u201chouse of Islam,\u201d\u00a0the ummah of faithful Muslims. Obama may really believe that \u201cNo God condones such terror\u201d like the beheadings perpetrated by Islamic State, but it is the Koran, the literal words of Allah, that says at 8.12: \u201cI will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such \u201cwillful blindness,\u201d as Andrew McCarthy has called it, to the traditional motivations of today\u2019s jihadists depends on clich\u00e9d lies like those Obama trades in. Perhaps that blindness explains his astonishing praise in his U.N. speech for Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, whose group has endorsed Hamas, who supported a 2004 fatwa calling on the faithful to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq\u00a0and another forbidding any \u201cnormalization\u201d of Israel, and was associated with an organization whose founder called for \u201cthe death of Jews and Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there is the last refuge of the morally addled, moral equivalency. In his remarks on the Arab war against Israel, Obama can\u2019t resist this cowardly cop out. Speaking of the endless and fruitless \u201cpeace process,\u201d Obama intones, \u201cWe cannot afford to turn away from this effort\u2013\u2013not when rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza.\u201d Of course, it is not Israelis \u201ctaking\u201d these children, it is the Hamas jihadists who use them as human shields, sacrificing their own children in order to gin up international condemnations in order to isolate Israel. Worse yet, such a sentence completely ignores the most important dimension of this violence: the decades of wars and terrorist attacks instigated by Arabs whose doctrinal hatred of Jews has compelled them since 1947 \u2014 when they violated a U.N. resolution with impunity\u2013\u2013 to serially refuse a state for the Palestinian Arabs or agree to \u201ctwo states living side by side, in peace and security,\u201d yet another stale clich\u00e9 useful for pretending to say something when one has nothing important to say. In reality, the Palestinian Arabs have made it clear that what they want is to destroy Israel.<\/p>\n

Yet nothing matches the surreal moral idiocy of Obama\u2019s next indulgence of moral equivalency:<\/p>\n

I realize that America\u2019s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri\u2013\u2013where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is one of the staple dogmas of the Progressive mind: the sins and crimes of America that require apologies and reparations, even as the millions of dead, tortured, and imprisoned in other nations are shrugged off. Obama began his presidency with the \u201capology tour\u201d in which he donned the hair shirt of American guilt for its imperialist depredations, its racist sins, and its global exploitation of others. Then as now, Obama ignores important distinctions. To equate the atrocities of Islamic State or Hamas, or the shooting down of a passenger jet in Ukraine that cost nearly 300 lives, with what probably will turn out to be the justified shooting of a lawbreaker assaulting a police officer, bespeaks either delusion or the sophistic pandering to an audience comprising the representatives of nations most of which are some of the planet\u2019s most brutal and murderous regimes.<\/p>\n

This speech proves once again that Obama is not a serious man. His badly trained mind is a warehouse of the sort of leftist and progressive received wisdom and dull clich\u00e9s that pollute our universities, media, and popular culture. He represents the moral idiocy and fashionable self-loathing that signals to our enemies and rivals that the United States can be had.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2014 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Barack Obama\u2019s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clich\u00e9s of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away. First was the obligatory call \u201cto renew the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[225,842,22,121,46],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-23f","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7728,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-and-the-u-n-s-alternate-universe\/","url_meta":{"origin":7889,"position":0},"title":"Obama and the U.N.\u2019s Alternate Universe","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Barack Obama has managed to push American foreign policy into an alternate universe in which everything the human race has learned over the past 2500 years about human nature, aggression, and its deterrence\u00a0has been stood on its head. He is not solely to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8260,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bad-ideas-breed-bad-foreign-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7889,"position":1},"title":"Bad Ideas Breed Bad Foreign Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 4, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Barack Obama\u2019s foreign policy will go down in U.S. history as one of the most dangerously inept ever. 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