Proof Obama is a Clear and Present Danger to America

Conclusive proof to all but the mentally deficient among us that Obama is a danger to America.  (Socialist) Economics aside, he is weakening us in reality, and in the eyes of our enemies, which is as bad or worse.  An enemy who views us a weak will be emboldened to strike us.  The vultures are beginning to circle in anticipation of having an American carcass to feast on soon.

Add a few of these things up and tell me that we have no cause for concern, and I’ll tell you that you need to use your Obamacare to reengage the half of your brain that is sitting idle.  China does not like us, and is in a position to destroy us economically today, and will soon be able to do so militarily as well.  Russia never did like us, and they are reemerging as a threat.  Russia is selling arms and technology to EVERYONE who hates us, i.e. Iran, China, Venezuela, and North Korea.  Iran is about to have a nuclear weapon, and all Obama can do is complement My-mood I’m-in-a-jihad and talk about sanctions that will never happen, and will not work.  China and Russia are forming “strategic alliances,” as are Russia and Venezuela.  Obama has alienated EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY that we have historically called allies, and whom we would rely on if we get into trouble.  Obama has bowed to every tin-pot dictator around the globe, and has now told them that we basically won’t do anything to stop them should they attack us.  The list goes on, and on, and on, and…

Obama apparently can’t destroy America quickly enough for his liking from within, so he is now trying to enlist the help of our enemies around the world.

For the good of America, and dare I say the world, Obama must go.

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April 07, 2010

Russia Moving Fast Before ‘Arms Control’ with U.S.

By Jane Jamison

The New York Times says that President Obama’s nuclear arms reduction agreement, to be signed within a few days, will significantly alter U.S. defense policy to “substantially narrow the conditions under which nuclear weapons could be used, even in self-defense.”

Is anyone in the Obama administration paying any attention to Vladimir Putin?

The Russian prime minister has just returned from his first-ever trip to Venezuela, with bear hugs for dictator-“presidente” Hugo Chávez.

Russia and Venezuela signed no fewer than 31 agreements in twelve hours. Russia has already sold Chávez $4 billion in military armaments, and now he has signed on for at least $5 billion more.

RTT NEWS:

The relationship between Moscow and Caracas has strengthened in recent years, with Venezuela buying military equipments worth $4 billion from Russia, including Sukhoi jet fighters, helicopters, tanks and assault rifles, since 2005.

During his latest visit to Venezuela, Putin had personally delivered four Russian Mi-17 helicopters President Chavez, the last of a batch of 38 military helicopters the South American country purchased from Russia in 2006.

Besides weapons, Venezuela wants nuclear power (“just for domestic purposes,” of course). Sadly, due to NASA budget cuts under Obama, it appears that Venezuela may have astronauts before America does in the future. Russia needs oil, and Putin came back with a $20-billion contract to partner with Venezuela in the Orinoco belt. Vladimir and Hugo. It’s all good.

Reuters:

We are not going to build the atomic bomb but we will develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. We have to prepare for the post-petroleum era,” Chavez said on Thursday.

While Putin was in Venezuela, China was taking delivery of weapons from Russia on Friday.

Russia has delivered 15 batteries of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to China, Interfax news agency reported, under a contract analysts said could be worth as much as $2.25 billion.

China is a major buyer of Russian weapons, and the two countries say they are trying to forge a strategic partnership, though senior Russian officials are privately concerned about an increasingly assertive China.

Russia has been conducting quite a business by selling the same S-300 “Favorit” (“the world’s most powerful and efficient air defense system”) to many countries hostile to the U.S. and Israel: Syria, India, Algeria, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. Russia is also well underway with even more advanced versions, the S-400 and S-500 series, the latter of which can repel attacks in space. The systems began marketing on YouTube videos and news releases dated in late February of this year.

A nagging concern is the fact that Russia signed a deal in 2005 to deliver anti-aircraft, anti-missile S-300s to Iran…with delivery originally set for 2009. It is not clear if they ever were delivered. Why don’t we know?

Obviously, this has presented a huge security concern to Israel.

Haaretz News:

The S-300 is considered to be one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world, and its capabilities allow it to intercept aircraft flying 30,000 meters up, from 150 kilometers away.

Netanyahu’s government began stepping up its pressure on Putin not to go forward with the arms deliveries to Iran last summer. While Russia was taking meetings with the Israelis, Putin also said that his country’s economic crisis makes the lucrative armaments business very attractive.

A Russian ship, which may have been delivering S-300s to Iran last August, mysteriously “disappeared” between Finland and Algeria. It is believed that the ship was destroyed by the Israeli Mossad security service, which was acting on a tip. There is speculation that the arms deal was brokered with Iran by rogue Russian military “black marketeers” rather than with the Russian government.

Heritage Foundation’s Dr. Ariel Cohen warned last year that the shipments to Iran must be thwarted:

Although the sale of the S-300 to Iran is not prohibited, such a deal would be a game changer in the Middle East. Tehran could threaten U.S. and allied troops’ aerial assets in Afghanistan and Iraq if Iran were to deploy the system along its borders. Furthermore, it would boost the defense of Iran’s Bushehr reactor, which Russia has built. Finally, Tehran could also use S-300s to protect its Natanz uranium enrichment plant, Arak heavy water plant, and other components of its sprawling nuclear and missile complex.

A nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to the region as Iran uses its nuclear arsenal to foster its hegemony in the Persian Gulf and beyond and would likely trigger a regional nuclear arms race. Israel, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would not sit idly while Tehran is building its nuclear arsenal.

In mid-February this year, after another eyeball-to-eyeball session with Putin in Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that there was an agreement to hold off on the S-300 deliveries to Iran…for now.

The Russians, however say that the delay is due only to “technical difficulties.” It wasn’t made clear when those “difficulties” might be cleared up and the shipments might proceed.

It may not make a whit of difference. While Obama and Secretary of State Clinton dither over sanctions and partnering countries, Iran sneers at the lack of foreign policy fortitude and races to a finish line of its own making.

It appears that while Vladimir Putin is allowing himself “official deniability” of any deal to directly arm Iran, the technology has nonetheless somehow made its way to Tehran. Just a few days ago,  Free Republic’s sources quoted Iranian military officials who say they have developed their own “indigenous” versions of the S-300.

Investor’s Business Daily now calls Secretary of State Clinton the “Bull in the China Shop Diplomat.” She seems overly preoccupied with micro-managing Israel’s apartment-building plans and picking fights with Canada over abortion health care policy, while ignoring such elephants in the room as Iran building nuclear weapons and Russia arming America’s enemies.

The Wall Street Journal opines that “Obama Seems Unserious about a Nuclear Iran.” If the Obama administration has accepted the inevitability of nuclear weapons in the hands of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, why would it cringe at Iran also being militarily able to demolish the Israeli fighter jets which come to destroy the nukes?

Take it a step further, and what assurance does Israel have at all anymore that the United States of Barack Obama will defend her if the worst comes from Iran?

Former Mayor of New York Ed Koch, a Democrat and a Jew who supported Barack Obama’s campaign, recently wrote an editorial in an Israeli newspaper, saying “The Trust is Gone.”

Humpty Dumpty has been broken and the absolute trust needed between allies is no longer there. How sad it is for the supporters of Israel who put their trust in President Obama.

Vladmir Putin has already proven once to Israel that he cannot be trusted. Kim Zigfeld wrote in American Thinker of Russia’s criss-cross hypocrisies of human rights violations, terrorism, and military aggression, while selling weapons of mass destruction to every enemy of this country.

In the meantime, Iran’s nuclear negotiator has just come back from a meeting on “energy” with China. China still refuses to join the U.S. in sanctions against Iran.

While Russians and Iranians are taking intercontinental flights cementing deals with our enemies, President Obama is rolling Easter eggs and playing baseball. Still feeling a headwind from passage of the health care bill, no doubt.

Obama is scheduled April 8 to sign a treaty with Russian president Medvedev to reduce nuclear weapons of the two countries “by 30 percent.”

Barack Obama presented his tepidly-received nuclear disarmament plan exactly one year ago today in Prague. It would appear, confirming our worst fears, that the only place in the “world with no nuclear weapons” will be the United States if we stay on the bobble-headed foreign policy course of Barack Obama.

Jane Jamison is publisher of the conservative news/commentary blog UNCOVERAGE.net.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/russia_moving_fast_before_arms.html at April 07, 2010 – 01:40:01 PM CDT

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April 07, 2010

Obama’s Nuclear Poser Review

By Pamela Geller

Barack Obama announced Monday what the New York Times called a “new strategy”: his Nuclear Posture Review. He is narrowing the conditions under which the U.S. would use nuclear weapons. For the first time since the U.S. became a nuclear power, the president of the United States has explicitly vowed that we will not use nukes even against countries that use chemical or biological weapons against us, or take us down with a massive cyber-attack — as long as those states are obeying the provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

He also overruled his own Secretary of Defense and said that no new nuclear weapons would be developed. Our aging, rusting arsenal is enough.

The New York Times lapdog reporting on this was pure Walter Duranty:

He dodged when asked whether he shared Israel’s view that a “nuclear capable” Iran was as dangerous as one that actually possessed weapons.

“I’m not going to parse that right now,” he said, sitting in his office as children played on the South Lawn of the White House at a daylong Easter egg roll. But he cited the example of North Korea, whose nuclear capabilities were unclear until it conducted a test in 2006, which it followed with a second shortly after Mr. Obama took office.

Obama is effectively saying to our enemies, bring it on, we won’t fight ya — leaving us naked and vulnerable like a virgin slipped a Rohypnol on her first date with a Chicagoland gangsta.

Obama is removing nuclear defense at a time when Iran’s devout mullahcracy is building its nuclear arsenal with the objective of establishing a global Islamic state. And what would Obama do about Iran’s nukes? He came out for a U.N. resolution on sanctions — one “that has bite,” in other words, one that will somehow be different from all the sanctions that are already in place. But he warned that it probably wouldn’t work: “We’re not naïve that any single set of sanctions automatically is going to change Iranian behavior…there’s no light switch in this process.”

I am actually embarrassed for my nation.

Obama is leaving America flailing in the hostile wind. Was there ever a more frightful time in American history than the age of Obama? Yes, there were very dangerous periods (the Civil War, World War I, World War II), but during those times of great crisis, the steward of this nation was always a patriot, a freedom-lover — an American. As I explain in my forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon & Schuster), Obama, in contrast, is a socialist internationalist who clearly despises this country and the whole idea of America, the first moral nation built on the principle of freedom itself in human history.

He himself said it in April 2009. During a visit to London for a summit of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), a reporter asked Obama: “[C]ould I ask you whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of ‘American exceptionalism’ that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?”

Obama offered no avowal of American uniqueness. Instead, he equated American exceptionalism with the national pride that a citizen of any nation could feel: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, America is nothing special. Just another country. Dick Cheney summed it up: “There’s never been a nation like the United States of America in world history, and yet when you have a president who goes around and bows to his hosts and then proceeds to apologize profusely for the United States, I find that deeply disturbing. That says to me this is a guy who doesn’t fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in.”

Of course, Obama knows what buttons to push. He assured us: “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure.” And now his cover in this subversive new suicide pact is his desire to make the world into a “nuclear free zone.”

Who does he think he’s kidding? What despot will ever freely and willingly give up his power? What evil dictator has ever surrendered that which made him strong? This policy is going to destroy us.

The hustler in the White House is setting us up. This isn’t a new strategy. This is surrender. He is making America into the laughingstock of the civilized world and the bullseye of the Axis of Evil.

Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster).

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/obamas_nuclear_poser_review.html at April 07, 2010 – 09:31:45 AM CDT

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Let’s Play, Pirates!

Evil can not be defeated with acquiescence. Evil must be confronted and defeated. To defeat these pirates, we do not have to go and “nation build” in Somalia. We need to defend our ships, sink any pirate ships that threaten us, and kill all pirates involved. The remaining pirates will get the message that if they screw with us, they die. Piracy of American ships stops. We’ve done it before, but I don’t think we have the guts to do it again.

Let’s Play, Pirates

by Ted Nugent (more by this author)
Posted 04/14/2009 ET

Ah, the open sea. An adventurous captain’s dream, we sail the vast oceans of the world. I’ve got this big old scow, sailing from port to port, loading up with merchandise, goods and raw materials to deliver to buyers from sellers around the globe.

Been doing it for time immemorial. Pretty simple, logical procedure really. No rocket science here. I simply pay attention, think and do the right thing. A responsible professional must never let his guard down and will always be prepared. Captain Nuge, reporting for duty. The last Boy Scout lives.

My ship is always maintained in tip-top shape for the grueling conditions that Mother Nature hits us with constantly. Fresh paint every other year or so, and I must keep my engines purring, rudder strong, propeller sturdy and straight and anchors and chains ready to do their jobs. Lifeboats and floatation gear for all on board are checked and double checked regularly.

My crew is the best there is: tough, rugged, jacks of all trade, professional sailors, ready, willing and capable to accomplish any task an angry sea could bring our way. Standard operating procedures all.

Our cook is the best there is. He always has fresh fruits and vegetables, quality beef, pork, poultry and all our favorite seafoods. He has quite the touch in the galley, preparing hearty meals for a hearty band of seafarers, so we can remain healthy and strong during our extended voyages.

We have never had a fire on board, but we do make certain that all the fire extinguishers, strategically located throughout the ship, are charged up to the max and that everyone knows how to handle them, just in case.

As captain of my ship, it is my duty to study weather conditions, political variations in all the geographical zones of our travels, and keep in constant touch with my government agencies so that I can avoid dangerous conditions, whether they be weather or politically related.

For example, though self defense is the most basic of human instincts, and no individual, much less a ship cruising international waters in these uncertain times would ever accept the irresponsible condition of unarmed helplessness, it is our routes along the coast of Somalia that demand my maximum attentiveness in these days of global terrorism.

Everyone knows about the horrors of Blackhawk Down, and this coastal hell zone of voodoo gangs is more unstable now than ever, virtually overrun with the lowest forms of life, the worst terrorist evildoers the world has ever known.

Knowing of this outrageously dangerous state of affairs, made that much more volatile by increased, nonstop attacks on shipping vessels by Somalian pirates, threatening lives, kidnapping and demanding enormous ransoms, I took the prudent steps to adequately protect myself, crew, ship and cargo. That other countries have made the insane mistake of emboldening these pirates by paying their ransoms, I knew it would just be a matter of time before these punk gangs would attack a ship sailing under the American flag. Bring it.

So, awhile back, after a briefing with my fellow sailors, we increased our artillery and ammunition on board and trained more diligently for a worse case scenario.

Each man on board has his own M-16 and 2000 rounds of ammo. Every third sailor is also equipped with a standard M-37 grenade launcher attached to his M-16 with a gross of grenades. And because the lives of my crew are sacred, I found a small company right here in the good old US of A that makes kits to protect them. I bought four, two fore and aft and two port and starboard. They are armored plate and sandbags, with a nice swivel mount for something on top. They didn’t cost much: about what I’d pay for a really good guitar.

And so, on top of the ones fore and aft is mounted a .Ma Deuce .50 caliber machinegun with 10,000 rounds, protecting our freedom one half-inch at a time. Port and starboard we have quad mounts of M-240 .30 cal machineguns with 10,000 rounds each. Every crew member is trained extensively in mastering each weapon, and these boys are all-American Sgt. York sniper marksmen, I assure you. We are not Navy SEALs, but we do our best.

We train diligently trained and keep a ten-man rotating 24 hour red alert watch detail, with instructions to identify any vessel approaching within 1000 yards of our ship, sound an “all hands on deck” alarm, fire one 20-round .50 cal burst across the bow of any invader vessel, then if it does not turn back, to literally blow it out of the water. Seems like the prudent thing to do.

Just as God gave us the individual right to keep and her arms to protect ourselves, our family and our homes, that self evident truth logic clearly applies to my ship and crew as well. We have a flag flying under our American flag with a coiled yellow snake that reads — “Don’t tread and me.” It is not just a cool phrase: we actually mean it.

I, for the life of me, cannot fathom the soulless mindset of choosing unarmed helplessness. It goes against the very pulse of mankind. This is my life, this is my ship, these men and this cargo are in my care. Helplessness invites and promotes evil to do as evil does.

On my ship of life, just the opposite message resonates. Keep your little terrorist dinghy at home boys, or I will turn you into shark food. Bon voyage.

(PS: As a very fortunate man, privileged and honored to train and hangout with the greatest warriors the world has ever known, it comes as no surprise to me that the mighty US Navy SEALs came through in this recent pirating of a US Merchant Martine ship, saved the kidnapped captain, killed three bad guys and captured a fourth. Those of us who cherish justice and good over evil salute the heroes of the American special ops and a Commander in Chief who gave the green light to do the right thing. God bless the warriors.)

Rock legend Ted Nugent is noted for his conservative political views and his vocal pro-hunting and Second Amendment activism. His smash bestseller Ted, White & Blue: The Nugent Manifesto, is now available at http://www.amazon.com. Nugent also maintains the Official Ted Nugent Site at http://www.TedNugent.com.

The Humbling of a Superpower

Another excellent perspective on the significance of Obama’s genuflection and kowtowing to the European weenies and to the Wahhabi King.  I submit to you, Greg Niedermier, that this IS NOT the kind of leader that America needs to defend us and maintain our standing as a benevolent super power.

The Humbling of a Superpower

by Nile Gardiner (more by this author)

Posted 04/09/2009 ET

It is hard to imagine a bigger slight to the memory of the more than 100,000 American soldiers who died liberating Europe than the image of a U.S. president attacking the “arrogance” of his own country on French soil. President Obama’s speech last week ahead of the NATO summit in Strasbourg, barely 500 miles from the beaches of Normandy, marked a low point in presidential speechmaking on foreign policy.

The largely French and German town hall audience cheered like ancient Romans in a packed Coliseum. This time, however, it was not Christians being fed to the lions but the symbolism of U.S. power, as the president lashed out at America’s “failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.” Obama bemoaned that “instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

The Franco-German crowd also clapped mightily in approval and bayed for more when the president boasted of closing down the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, declaring that “without equivocation or exception that the United States of America does not and will not torture,” as though his own country had been some sort of brutal tyranny that had suddenly seen the light with his election. It was a thoroughly distasteful attack on the previous administration’s interrogation of extremely dangerous terror suspects, feeding into the very anti-Americanism that Obama had half-heartedly challenged earlier in his address.

This was a humiliating spectacle to behold as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth prostrated his country before a European audience that lapped up his message as though it was manna from heaven. Obama’s actions represented the humbling of a superpower on the world stage, a defining moment for a new administration that is weakening American global leadership and taking every opportunity to engage with its enemies, such as Iran, or its strategic competitors, including Russia and China.

It was an approach that failed to reap any dividends on the president’s European tour. If anything, this trip proved there is little to be gained from bending to the whims of European governments, who simply view it as weakness to be exploited and used to their own advantage. When Obama urged Europeans to play a bigger role in the NATO mission in Afghanistan, his words were met in the Strasbourg amphitheatre with an eerie silence, as though this was a ridiculous request and an affront to their delicate sensibilities.

Behind the scenes at the NATO summit, there was no evidence of goodwill towards the pleas of the rock star-like American president. Obama succeeded only in securing a weak-kneed pledge of 5,000 European trainers and military police to join the NATO-led International Security Force in Afghanistan, most of whom will remain in the country only until the elections in August. Great Britain was the only European nation to offer a significant number of additional combat troops — 1,000 — to be added to the 8,300 British forces already on the ground.

It is continental European leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who should be apologizing for the failure of their own countries to fight in Afghanistan, while American, British and Canadian troops are dying in large numbers on the battlefields. The brutal fact is that Obama achieved nothing at all at the NATO summit, and the war in Afghanistan remains overwhelmingly a conflict fought by a small group of English-speaking nations who continue to take 85 percent of the casualties in the fight against the Taliban, while most of Europe sits pathetically on the sidelines with cowardly indifference.

In world affairs, popularity rarely brings with it concrete results. Ronald Reagan was reviled in Europe but together with Margaret Thatcher brought down the might of the Soviet Empire. President Bush was burnt in effigy in almost every capital city across the European Union but succeeded in liberating sixty million Muslims from tyranny and kept the United States safe from terrorist attack in the years following 9/11.

It wasn’t much better for Obama at the preceding G-20 summit in London, where European leaders made all the running. Obama may have stolen the limelight and the best photo-ops but shaped little of the policy. Eventually the United States signed up to a communiqué that pledged $750 billion for the IMF, a European-dominated highly ineffective organization, as well as laying the foundations of a new global regulatory architecture for the financial industry, that poses a huge threat to American national sovereignty and the freedom of American companies to operate in global markets.

As the Obama administration will gradually begin to realize, world leadership is not a popularity contest. Rather, it is about taking tough decisions and positions that will be met with hostility in many parts of the globe. It is about the assertive projection of American power, both to secure the homeland and to protect the free world. It is often a lonely and unenviable task that at times will require the use of maximum force against America’s enemies and a willingness to face the scorn of countries whose glories are way behind them, or who lack the courage and conviction to do what is right.

Obama faces a world that in many ways is even more dangerous than the one that existed during the Cold War, with an array of rogue regimes close to developing offensive nuclear weapons capability, as well as a global terrorist network that seeks the very destruction of the United States and its allies. This is not the time for flower power speeches repenting for the so-called “arrogance” of the globe’s only superpower, or pointless declarations about creating a “nuclear free world.”

The president must deal with the world as it is now, not as he imagines it. This requires confronting the Mullahs of Tehran and tyrants such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il, and standing up to Russian aggression in its ‘Near Abroad.’ It also involves a determination to wage a global war, not an “Overseas Contingency Operation,” against Islamist groups and networks in the form of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and an array of other terrorist organizations. This will require significantly increased military spending not less, as well as the full implementation of a global missile defense system.

This is not a moment for faint hearts and 60s-style pacifism, but a time for America to project its might on the world stage and defeat its enemies. Europe can mock and jeer on the sidelines all it likes, but will quickly rediscover that its own security ultimately lies in supporting a United States that roars like a lion rather than bleats like a lamb.

Cartoon by Brett Noel.

Nile Gardiner, Ph.D. is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, and a Margaret Thatcher Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

Obama and Liberal War on Christianity Gaining Momentum

Here is an outstanding analysis and exposition on Obama and the liberals war on Christianity. There’s very little to add to the article except this:

Obama says we (Americans) are not and never will be at war with islam. This may prove to be true, but the simple fact is that islam, or at least some percentage of it, IS and HAS BEEN at war with America and western civilization for some time. Sadly, most of our Neville Chamberlain, head-in-the-sand liberals refuse to admit this fact.

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Obama’s Unholy War Against Christianity, Not Islam

By George Neumayr on 4.8.09 @ 6:08AM

The more illiberal a religion, the more liberals tend to like it. Western liberals who propose no place for God in the public square can usually be counted on to excuse non-western religions that impose a false and dangerous one upon it.

The explanation for this apparent contradiction goes beyond the childish and self-hating affinity of western liberals for all things non-western. The deeper reason is western liberalism’s attachment to irrationality. Having ruptured a once-harmonious relationship between reason and religion in their own culture, western liberals can’t seem to stop themselves from championing similar ruptures in alien ones.

By different routes of irrationality, western liberals and militant Muslims arrive at the same spot. Western liberals reach it by a distorted “reason” without faith, militant Muslims by a distorted “faith” without reason, with each imbalance producing its own culture of death: abortion and euthanasia in the west, jihad in the east.

An old-style liberal like Oriana Fallaci found it amazing that Enlightenment liberals could defend so enthusiastically the gross illiberal tendencies of militant Muslims and puzzled over how two seemingly different groups could turn up on the same side in debates. But it is not surprising if one considers their shared rejection of reason properly understood and the common enemy that rouses them — a lingering Christianity in the west.

But, says the day-to-day watcher of politics, who cares? What does any of this have to do with Barack Obama’s speech in Turkey earlier in the week? A lot, actually. Behind the speech is the above-mentioned phenomenon; it contained a deep sympathy for Islam that Obama would never extend to traditional Christianity.

As Obama gears up to abolish the conscience rights of Christian pro-lifers at American hospitals, as he uses executive orders to force Christians to finance abortions at home and abroad, as he places Christian opponents of gay marriage in the moral category of racists, he tells Turkey that “America is not and never will be at war with Islam” and accepts the moderation of Muslims without question.

Never mind that self-proclaimed moderate Muslims in Turkey, Sufi-Shia Muslims, have been persecuted by the Turkish government; never mind that Turkish Christians have been persecuted too, banned from opening churches or running seminaries and thrown into jail for insulting “Turkishness” after giving open witness to Jesus Christ.

No, none of this is worrisome to Obama. His enemy is not Islam abroad, but Christianity at home. Indeed, if he treated Muslims the way he treats believing Christians in America, Muslims would call it a holy war.

As far as Obama is concerned, the only religion to be “reformed” — which is to say destroyed — is not the west’s historic adversary but its progenitor. Islam is peaceful, he pronounces, while traditional Christianity is bigoted and dangerous. Islam is a friend to America, while traditional Christians are, as Obama supporter Tom Hanks described Proposition 8 supporters, “un-American.”

Obama has in effect declared to Christians in America: either bring your understanding of Christianity into line with my liberalism or don’t bother entering the public square. You want federal money? Well, then perform abortions, distribute condoms, hire homosexual activists, etc., etc. He would never dare talk to Muslims in those terms. He will give back ancestral swords to freed Muslims from Guantanamo Bay and hand forceps to Christian doctors.

If Muslims had to endure patronizing and lying secularist drivel from him like “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values,” they would riot. Cowed and secularized Christians just nod and offer him an honorary degree.

George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.