Barack Obama is being blasted for comments on why he avoids using terms such as “radical Islamic terrorism,” with one prominent voice saying the president sounds like a defense lawyer for the attackers.
“There’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam,'” the president said Tuesday during remarks at the Treasury Department. “It’s a political talking point, not a strategy.”
He continued: “What exactly would using this language accomplish? What exactly would it change?”
“Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above,” he said. “Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”
In response, top-rated radio host Rush Limbaugh said, “It sounds to me like it’s the way defense lawyers talk. You know, when there’s a suspect, you got a defense lawyer saying, ‘Well, there’s no conclusive evidence here. We’re still looking for a motive. We haven’t found the right motive.’ Obama comes out after every one of these things, every one of these events, and Obama ends up sounding like defense lawyers speak on behalf of their clients. He doesn’t reflect the national mood about these things. It’s not even close.”
“As far as he’s concerned, they’re just a bunch of ‘militants’ that got hold of some guns, as in Fast and Furious,” Limbaugh added.
“In his world, there’s nothing that sets these people apart from any other band of bad guys or criminals. And that’s how he talks about them, and that’s what makes me suspicious. There’s clearly a difference. These people announce their intentions, they announce their objectives, and then they go fulfill them.”
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton share this in common: both live in a fantasy world where Islam is a religion of peace and good will and acts of terrorism are the result of internet propaganda and a gun culture rather than the hate-filled venom found in the Qu'ran or Islamic fundamentalism.
As I noted in a previous post, in his book entitled Truth and Tolerance:
Christian Belief and World Religions, Pope Benedict XVI makes a few observations
which some Catholics would apparently find problematic. The Holy Father writes,
"To what extent the new surge forward of the Islamic world is fuelled by truly
religious forces is..open to question. In many places, as we can see, there is
the danger of a pathological development of the autonomy of feeling.." (p.
104).
On page 204 of the same book, Pope Benedict XVI writes,
"...even with Islam, with all the greatness it represents, is always in danger
of losing balance, letting violence have a place and letting religion slide away
into mere outward observance and ritualism."
Lee Harris, in his important
book entitled The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West, notes
how
Islam's fanatical intolerance isn't limited to the Taliban or groups which
openly call for Jihad. He writes, "Another example of the persistence of the
fanatical intolerance of Muslims came to the world's attention in the same year
as the cartoon riots. A Muslim in Afghanistan had converted to Christianity -
the same Afghanistan that the United States had liberated from the fanaticism of
the Taliban. But fanatical intolerance in Afghanistan clearly did not require an
organization like the Taliban to keep it alive. Here again, it sprang up quite
spontaneously from the religious and learned mullahs and from the bulk of the
people. Islamic law demands that an apostate from Islam should be executed, and
there were cries for blood that again took the form of riots and outrageous
pronouncements from Muslim clerics, one of whom urged that the apostate be torn
limb from limb by the people themselves. Fortunately, due to pressure from the
West, the man was flown out of Afghanistan to sanctuary in Italy." (p. 210).
Hilaire Belloc wrote in The Great Heresies, "
Mohammedanism...began as a
heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it
was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. It
vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those
who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was not a denial, but an
adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing. It differed from most (not from
all) heresies in this, that it did not arise within the bounds of the Christian
Church. The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs,
a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But
that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was
the great Catholic world on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was
all around him and whose territories he had known by travel_which inspired his
convictions. He came of, and mixed with, the degraded idolaters of the Arabian
wilderness, the conquest of which had never seemed worth the Romans'
while.
He took over very few of those old pagan ideas which might have
been native to him from his descent. On the contrary, he preached and insisted
upon a whole group of ideas which were peculiar to the Catholic Church and
distinguished it from the paganism which it had conquered in the Greek and Roman
civilization. Thus the very foundation of his teaching was that prime Catholic
doctrine, the unity and omnipotence of God. The attributes of God he also took
over in the main from Catholic doctrine: the personal nature, the all-goodness,
the timelessness, the providence of God, His creative power as the origin of all
things, and His sustenance of
all things by His power alone. The world of
good spirits and angels and of evil spirits in rebellion against God was a part
of the teaching, with a chief evil spirit, such as Christendom had recognized.
Mohammed preached with insistence that prime Catholic doctrine, on the human
side the immortality of the soul and its responsibility for actions in this
life, coupled with the consequent doctrine of punishment and reward after
death.
If anyone sets down those points that orthodox Catholicism has in
common with Mohammedanism, and those points only, one might imagine if one went
no further that there should have been no cause of quarrel. Mohammed would
almost seem in this aspect to be a sort of missionary, preaching and spreading
by the energy of his character the chief and fundamental doctrines of the
Catholic Church among those who had hitherto been degraded pagans of the Desert.
He gave to Our Lord the highest reverence, and to Our Lady also, for that
matter. On the day of judgment (another Catholic idea which he taught) it was
Our Lord, according to Mohammed, who would be the judge of mankind, not he,
Mohammed. The Mother of Christ, Our Lady, "the Lady Miriam" was ever for him the
first of womankind. His followers even got from the early fathers some vague
hint of her Immaculate Conception.
But the central point where this new
heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full
denial of the Incarnation. Mohammed did not merely take the first steps toward
that denial, as the Arians and their followers had done; he advanced a clear
affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God.
He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a
prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether.
With
that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure. He refused
to know anything of the Eucharist, with its Real Presence; he stopped the
sacrifice of the Mass, and therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In
other words, he, like so many
other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on
simplification.
Catholic doctrine was true (he seemed to say), but it had
become encumbered with false accretions; it had become complicated by needless
man-made additions, including the idea that its founder was Divine, and the
growth of a parasitical caste of priests who battened on a late, imagined,
system of Sacraments which they alone could administer. All those corrupt
accretions must be swept away.
There is thus a very great deal in common
between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood,
the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the
central motive force of the Reformation, did the same. As we all know, the new
teaching relaxed the marriage laws but in practice this did not affect the mass
of his followers who still remained monogamous. It made divorce as easy as
possible, for the sacramental idea of marriage disappeared. It insisted upon the
equality of men, and it necessarily had that further factor in which it
resembled Calvinism the sense of predestination, the sense of fate; of what the
followers of John Knox were always calling 'the immutable decrees of God.'
Mohammed's teaching never developed among the mass of his followers, or in
his own mind, a detailed theology. He was content to accept all that appealed to
him in the Catholic scheme and to reject all that seemed to him, and to so many
others of his time, too complicated or mysterious to be true."
Islam is
useful to those who wish to promote a humanitarian religion in which Christ is
regarded merely as a man. The Incarnation must be rejected,
the God-Man must be replaced by the
man-God.
As Archbishop Fulton Sheen warned:"
A common spirit will
eventually bind all atheists together to produce the man-god, as there is a
common spirit which unites those who live by Christ....The mere denial of God is
not emptiness and a negation but the affirmation of man as God. It does not take
a gift of prophecy to see that humanity is presently polarizing and that all men
are beginning to fall into the ranks of accepting either the man-god or the
God-Man." Much of the liberal mainstream media has a real hatred for the
Catholic Church and Christianity in general. They view Christianity as no longer
fit for "modern man," as a religion which must be purged of its dogmas and made
to fit with a new order.
The Holy Spirit teaches us through the Apostle
John that, "This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that
acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit
that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God. This is the spirit of
the Antichrist that, as you heard, is to come, but in fact is already in the
world." (1 John 4: 2-3).
And that dark spirit is growing daily.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton exemplify this dark spirit.
