Let me read part of his answer again,
“And more than a billion people who practice Islam, the overwhelming majority view their obligations to their religion as ones that reaffirm peace and justice and fairness and tolerance.” Really? Where does this happen? In Paradise after they blow themselves up, because neither peace, justice, fairness or tolerance has been given to the hundreds of thousands of women who have suffered under Islam. You know, the ones that have been and are being subjected to things such as:
•Obligatory female genital castration;
•Stoning to death of adulteresses;
•Compulsory acceptance of polygamy and forced child marriages;
•Beating of disobedient women and girls;
•Requirement of the testimony of four male witnesses to prove rape;
•Requirement of women to obtain permission from husbands for daily freedoms, such as leaving the house unescorted by a male family member
Yes, there are some really fair and just things to chew on.
The last sentence of his first paragraph is truly questionable :“I think all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence towards innocent people that is never justified.”
A few extremists? A few? How many exactly is a few?
Daniel Greenfield who has a blog known as “Sultan Knish” answered just this question in his article “Who is Really Distorting Islam?” He wrote about the “few”,How did the rest of the world look at his answer? The Dubai-based commentator Aijaz Zaka Syed wrote in the Arab news,
“How many exactly is a "few"? Are we talking about a few dozen, a few thousand, a few million? Naturally Obama and the Islam apologists never really address that question. Because it is a rather inconvenient question. Since Muslims are defined by religious streams and mosque attendance, it should be easy enough to come up with a realistic figure.
We could start with the population of Saudi Arabia, which ranks at some 25 million. That is quite a "few" extremists right there. Then there's Pakistan with a population of 166 million. That's a few more, right there. Of course officially both countries are allies of the United States and have nothing to do with terrorism. Even when it's funded by their own governments.
So let's move on to a slightly more definitive figure. In 2006, the Palestinian Arabs held an election. 440,000 of them voted for Hamas. A terrorist organization. In the 2009 Lebanon election, a coalition that included Hezbollah and the Baath Party won over 800,000 votes. So certainly we know that there are more than 1 million "misunderstanders" of Islam out there. And that's out of a tiny portion of the Muslim world.”
“But it was a studious girl who walked out with the cake when she queried him about jihad and what he thought of it. As if Obama was a Sheikh [from] Al Azhar or Ayatollah from Qom to issue a fatwa on jihad!”The Telegraph article also had an extremely valid point,
I see, so one has to be a Sheikh to be allowed to speak out against Jihad.
Even the Arab News knew exactly what Anam meant when she said Jihad, otherwise why would they even mention a fatwa against it, unless they want to put an end to their own “internal struggles”?
It's also interesting that in a country where 80.5% of the population is Hindu while only 13.4 % is Muslim and only 2.3 % Christian, the Telegraph in Calcutta, India, interviewed Anam and she said she is a Muslim.
“I am Muslim but I did not ask him the question because I am Muslim. I just wanted to know. I was nervous when I asked him the question, and surprised that I should be the first to be called upon to question him.”
“Barack Hussein Obama, they call him in Islamic countries in West Asia and the conservatives back home have accused him of being “socialist”, as if that were a bad word.”
Why is it that in the Islamic and West Asian countries they always use his middle name and here in the U.S. anyone who dared utter “Hussein” was accused of being a racist or Islamaphobe?
But what really gets my blood pressure up isn't the fact that he didn't answer Anam's question, it was that he played right into the hands of the jihadists! I am sure Al-Jazeera television loved that clip.
