Obama's Iftar Dinner

Obama's politically correct spin on Islam grows more and more buffoonish. At the very moment he accuses Christians of waging a "war on women," he casts Islam as a benevolent religion to which the Sandra Flukes could take refuge.

He used his remarks at this year's Iftar dinner to praise Islam as a female-friendly religion. "Indeed, you know that the Koran teaches, 'Be it man or woman, each of you is equal to the other,'" he said. For Obama, it is the Bible, not the Koran, that reeks of dangerous patriarchy. Obama has mocked the Book of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and St. Paul's letters, but he would never dare question a passage in the Koran, which he regards as a holy and blameless book in no need of politically correct revision.

If the oppression at Georgetown gets to be too much for Sandra Fluke, she could always try her luck in the Islamic world, where the rights of women are spreading like wildfire, according to Obama. Thanks in part to Islam, he said, this year's Olympics can be dubbed "The Year of the Woman," as Muslim countries generously allowed a few women to play: "Also, for the very first time in Olympic history, every team now includes a woman athlete. And one of the reasons is that every team from a Muslim-majority country now includes women as well."

Obama was particularly pleased that women got the chance to "face down tanks" in the Arab Spring. Nothing proves sameness between the sexes better than the equal opportunity to die.

Obama seemed unable to get his favorite constituency off his mind, excitedly noting that one of the first "Muslim chaplains at an American college" is a woman, Sanaa Nadim. How did the imams in attendance at the dinner feel about that remark? No doubt they murmur to themselves that Obama is an idiot, albeit a very useful one.

Obama also peppered his speech with his customary deceptions about America's Islamic-friendly origins. "As I've noted before, Thomas Jefferson once held a sunset dinner here with an envoy from Tunisia -- perhaps the first Iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago," he said. Notice Obama's weasely use of the word "perhaps." Why the hedging? Because he knows perfectly well that it wasn't an Iftar dinner but a war negotiation. Seeking to end the Barbary War with Islamic pirates, Jefferson invited Tunisian envoy Sidi Soliman Mellimelli to Washington. He invited him to a dinner at the White House not to honor Islam but to end a war. The dinner happened to coincide with Ramadan. Jefferson pushed the time back for the dinner to "sunset" in order to ensure that Mellimelli would attend. It wasn't by any stretch of the imagination an Iftar dinner.

But Obama wasn't done misleading his audience. "And some of you, as you arrived tonight, may have seen our special display, courtesy of our friends at the Library of Congress -- the Koran that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. And that's a reminder, along with the generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam-- like so many faiths -- is part of our national story." He failed to mention that Jefferson purchased the Koran in order to understand the attitudes and tactics of the Barbary pirates. For Jefferson, it wasn't a holy book but a manual for war. No mention of that on the placard near the "special display." (If Obama really wanted to wow his Muslim friends, he should have shown them "Jefferson's Bible" over at the Smithsonian's History Museum, which is a tribute to TJ's secularist tastes in that he deleted from his copy of the Bible all references to the supernatural. Jefferson's secularized Bible foreshadowed the left-wing Christianity that Obama now espouses.)

Obama concluded his remarks with an absurdly hypocritical paean to "freedom of religion." As he purges Christianity from public life, forbidding any public application of it that conflicts with his liberal dictates, Obama has the gall to gush about religious freedom as a "universal right." In Obama's envisioned America, Islam belongs to the "national story" while Judeo-Christianity marks a chapter best forgotten.