Delusion

delusion |diˈlo͞oZHən|

noun

an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument….

The Obama administration’s oratorical contortions to avoid identifying radical Islam with terrorism are on the verge of becoming self-parodies.

The evasions are not only bizarre they inhibit Muslim leaders from speaking out against the radicals who are hi-jacking their faith. After all, if the president of the United States refuses to identify the terrorists as radicalized Muslim, why would they?

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisis, in a New Year’s Day speech at Al-Azhar, explained why when he told the audience of religious scholars:

It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (multinational community of Muslim believers) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible! That thinking – I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!

“Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands.”

He called for no less than  “a religious revolution” … Warning that: “Extremists have exploited religion to sanctify terrorism, and actions must be taken to prevent individuals from misinterpreting religious texts. “

The late Irving Kristol described the historical conditions that make such an effort necessary:

One may concede that the Arabs did indeed have a glorious history and have certainly made important contributions to human civilization (more precisely, to Western civilization). But all that ended some 500 years ago. For these past five centuries, the history of the Arabs is one of relative stagnation and political impotence… 

… This refusal to come to terms with five centuries of Arab history induces a kind of permanent hysteria among the Arab peoples, a political pathology that, time and again, is self-defeating. Contemporary Arab history exemplifies this phenomenon…

Why? Why such an enduring cast of mind? China and India, after all, also had grand civilizations in the past… Arab Islam is the purest form of Islam, uncontaminated or diluted by other influences that have shaped the Islamic religion in say, Indonesia or Nigeria. Arab Islam, therefore, retains much of the original Islamic passion—to be, as of divine right, the world’s supreme religion and to achieve this status by force, if necessary. 

“After the Gulf War, What?” Wall Street Journal, February 1991

Since Kristol’s warning, that passion has become lethal. Victor David Hanson recently wrote more on the same topic.

The sense of perceived persecution in the Middle East is real — analogous to Germany’s lamentations after the Versailles Treaty. The retreat into Islamic-inspired terror reflects a larger, complex stew of anger at the reach of Western globalization into traditional and conservative Islamic societies and of envy of the wealth and influence of the Western world, combined with an inability to offer self-critical analyses about the role of tribalism, statism, gender apartheid, religious fundamentalism, intolerance, autocracy, and antisemitism in institutionalizing poverty and instability.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396697/muslims-and-islamists-victor-davis-hanson/page/0/1

Eli Lake, in his Bloomberg column, added statistics to the discussion He writes that even in countries allied with the U.S. in the war on terror, large pluralities of Muslims still endorse the aims of radical Islam.

 For example, 74 percent of Muslims in Egypt feel that sharia should be the “country’s official legal code,” and an equal majority say it should apply to non-Muslims as well as Muslims, according to a 2013 Pew Survey. Three-quarters of Pakistani Muslims support laws banning blasphemy. A majority of Muslim Iraqis said they supported “honor killings” of women who engage in premarital sex or adultery.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-19/why-obama-can-t-call-charlie-hebdo-terrorists-radical-islamists-

President Obama clearly has a different vision of the Muslim world. His determination to deny the existence of Islamic terrorism has encouraged the silence of Muslim civic and religious leaders and discouraged dissent at home. The few who speak out are labeled Islam-o-phobic and subjected to the secular version of a public shaming.

In a 2009 speech at Cairo University he proclaimed:

I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.  Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

The president’s inability to say terrorism and radical Islam in the same sentence indicates that, unlike the president of Egypt, he is unaffected by the threat to Islam and to Western civilization.