|
Making Believe
Obama's speech was deep in fable, short on factBy Andrew C. McCarthy The Islamic world has heard the much anticipated speech about the relationship between Islam and America from "Barack Hussein Obama" -- emphasis added by the president himself, who until recently considered the use of his middle name a right-wing smear. The oration was called "A New Beginning." "A Pretend Beginning" would have been a more accurate. Though President Obama has won plaudits from some surprising quarters -- including from National Review -- the speech was warmed-over leftist dogma sprinkled with a fictional accounting of Islam and its history. NR's editors forgive this as the "obvious consideration" that a presidential address must "stress some truths more than others and soften the harsher ones." This is a promiscuous conception of truth. What the president did was promote various fictions about Islam while airbrushing truths that are not merely harsh but are the facts behind the rampage that has victimized us for much of the last three decades. That rampage, moreover, was substantially discounted in a haze of moral equivalence. It would be bad enough to do this under any circumstances, but it is inexcusable to do it while paying only lip-service to one of the few truths the president did speak: namely, that any "partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't." Rest at link Posted by: ed 2009-06-06 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=271351 |