The Wrong Speech

In about an hour, President Obama is going to give one of the most anticipated speeches of his presidency. He will face an audience in Cairo, Egypt, and try to "win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world."

It's a speech he shouldn't be giving, to an audience that really doesn't want to listen to the truth.

In the Islamic world, the United States is the penultimate villain, second only to Israel. Autocratic rulers divert anger at their venality and failure by encouraging their people to blame the United States for everything. Huge crowds gather at the drop of a hat to chant "Death to America!"

That would, of course, be the America that spends tens of millions of dollars on aid to those same countries each year.

In an article in yesterday's Washington post, a clerk in an Egyptian store was quoted as saying that "At least he (Obama) has to apologize. He can either apologize himself or on the behalf of his predecessors. But there needs to be recognition."

Yes, there needs to be recognition. There need to be apologies. But the wrong people are being told they must recognize and apologize. A large part of that recognition and a great deal of apology must come from a Muslim world that doesn't recognize anything beyond the blinders of its own interests and prejudices.

Let's look at the record ....

It was a group of 19 Muslims who murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and it was Muslim crowds who danced in the streets of the Middle East in celebration of that horrendous crime.

It was Muslims who insisted that the murders of 9/11 were committed by the CIA and the Israeli Mossad, refusing to believe all evidence to the contrary.

It was Muslims who rioted, burned churches, and murdered Christians because they felt insulted by remarks delivered by Pope Benedict in a speech at Regensburg, Germany, a few years ago. These would be the same Muslims who see nothing wrong with referring to Christians and Jews as "apes and pigs."

It is Islamic so-called holy men who churn out fatwas blaming all the ills of the world on the United States and encouraging their followers to murder and hatred.

It is those same so-called holy men who insist on returning the Islamic world to an imagined seventh-century paradise ... because things were supposedly perfect in Mohammed's time, and are much worse now.

It is those same so-called holy men who encourage impressionable young people to commit suicide in the act of murdering those who practice religions other than Islam, telling them they will be entertained by legions of virgins in an imagined paradise.

I think it is the Islamic world that owes the United States an apology. It will never happen, though.

I'll take the opinions of Muslims seriously on the day I see huge crowds in the streets of Arab cities chanting "Death to Osama bin Laden!" I'll take the opinions of Muslims seriously on the day the Council on American Islamic Relations condemns terrorism committed by Muslims, instead of whitewashing the acts and blaming them on the victims.

I'm not holding my breath.

I hope that the President doesn't use his speech to do nothing but apologize for the supposed wrongs of the United States. I hope he uses it to point out the failures, the blindness, and the hatred of the Islamic world. I hope that he tells his audience not just that "America is not at war with Islam," but that most Americans believe the Islamic world is at war with us.

I'm not holding my breath for that, either.

The President will speak eloquently, as he always does. But his audience will only hear what it wants to hear. And it only wants to hear America make abject apologies for its sins, real and imagined.

It's just a good thing I'm not giving that speech. I'm too angry to be eloquent in the face of an audience that's spring-loaded to hate me just because I have committed the heinous dual sins of being an American and not being a Muslim.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo