Obama’s disturbing UN speech
Posted by Richard on September 29, 2012
I finally got around to checking out the President’s address to the UN General Assembly. Although there were some good phrases, the general “can’t we all just get along” tone left me cold.
So did his reiterated denunciation of that “crude and disgusting video” and the tepid defense of the First Amendment that followed, which made it sound like the difference between those who protect free speech and those who suppress it is merely a matter of taste, a preference that, understandably, not everyone shares (“I know that not all countries in this body share this understanding of the protection of free speech”).
And I found this bit quite disturbing (emphasis added):
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” …
Does Obama (or his speech writer) really not understand the meaning of those words to much of the Muslim world? To a devout, fundamentalist Muslim, you slander Muhammad if you deny that he was a prophet, a messenger of God, and that the words he spoke are the words of God. To much of the Muslim world, the President might as well have said, “The future must not belong to those who reject Islam.”
Obama then engaged his favorite rhetorical device, dialectic. We must also condemn the desecration of Jesus? He and his Socialist Democrats have aggressively defended taxpayer funding, via the National Endowment for the Arts, of “Piss Christ” and a dung-covered Mary, among others. It’s the people who dared to condemn such works of “art” (without, I might add, any rioting, burning, or killing) and who opposed federal funding of them whom Obama and his cohort have condemned.
Intolerance is a form of violence? By embracing that absurd statement, he negated his earlier defense (such as it was) of free speech and threw overboard the First Amendment. And he posited a moral equivalence between those who criticize 7th-century barbarians and those barbarians, who raped and murdered a US ambassador, call for the extermination of Jews, subjugate women, keep slaves, and execute homosexuals.
All in all, a sorry performance by the President of the United States and purported leader of the free world. Rep. Mike Coffman was correct when he said of Obama that “in his heart, he’s not an American.” His leftist ethics and post-modernist epistemology make him at best a reluctant defender of the values that created and sustained this country, and at worst an apologist for and underminer of those values.
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