AP Scrubs 'Muslim' from Obama's Self-Referential Joke

AP Scrubs ‘Muslim’ from Obama’s Self-Referential Joke

Posted By Robert Spencer On April 30, 2013

Warner Todd Huston reported at Breitbart Monday that “in some of its reports on Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the Associated Press failed to include one of President Obama’s own gags.”

Obama said: “These days I look in the mirror and have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be.” But, noted Huston, “in one version of the night’s story (as seen at Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Breitbart Wires, the Ottawa Citizen, and The Columbian to name a few), the AP’s Bradley Klapper forgot one part of the President’s joke,” reporting his words as “I’m not the strapping young Socialist that I used to be,”

Why? Did they think it had too much of a ring of truth?

Why did some editors at AP or at the publications that picked up the AP story think it necessary to run interference for Obama on this point?

By mocking the idea that he is a Muslim (and a Socialist), Obama is trying to render these things too ridiculous for serious public discussion. Fine. His personal beliefs are of no moment, except insofar as they influence his public stances. And the direction of his public policies is obvious. He has maintained a consistent foreign policy line that has enabled the establishment of several Islamic supremacist, pro-Sharia states in North Africa and the Middle East, and a domestic policy that has enabled the advance of the Islamic supremacist agenda to assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law and practice wherever they conflict. No amount of mockery will obscure that.

The record is clear. As demonstrations and revolts swept the Muslim world during Obama’s first term, he was enthusiastic. He had encouraging words for the “Arab Spring” demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia, and even gave military assistance to their Libyan counterparts. During the third and last debate of the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney and Obama sparred over which could express support for the Syrian rebels (who are dominated by Islamic jihadists) more strongly, and as Obama’s second term began, his administration was inching ever closer to military aid for those rebels. Yet there were two large-scale demonstrations in Muslim countries that Obama did not support – and those two exceptions are extraordinarily revealing about his disposition, as well as his policy, toward Islam.

The two pro-democracy revolts that Obama refused to support were arguably the only two that were genuinely worthy of the pro-democracy label: the demonstrations against the Islamic regime in Iran in 2009, and the anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations in Egypt in winter 2013. There is a common thread between these two that distinguishes them from all the others: in Egypt in late 2012 and early 2013, as well as in Iran in 2009, the demonstrators were protesting against Islamic states; all the other demonstrations led to the establishment of Islamic states. To be sure, the Iranian demonstrators in 2009 contained many pro-Sharia elements that simply objected to the way the Islamic Republic was enforcing Sharia, but they also included many who wanted to reestablish the relatively secular society that prevailed under the last Shah. Whether the Sharia or the democratic forces would have won out in the end is a question that will never be answered – in no small part thanks to Barack Obama.

In every case Barack Obama has been consistent: in response to the demonstrations and uprisings in the Islamic world, he has without exception acted in the service of Islamic supremacist, pro-Sharia regimes. For whatever complex of personal affinity and political calculation, he has steered the United States, in the words of the Egyptian newspaper Rose el-Youssef, “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The transformation of U.S. foreign and domestic policy is the most significant manifestation of Obama’s warmly positive stance toward Islam. Speaking at the Pentagon in 2010 on the ninth anniversary of 9/11, Barack Obama returned to a recurring theme of his presidency: that the attacks on Americans and the war that has been declared against the West have nothing do with Islam. “As Americans, we will not and never will be at war with Islam,” Obama declared, echoing almost verbatim words he used in his June 2009 Cairo address, and then adding: “It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men, which perverts religion.”

George W. Bush had affirmed that the U.S. was not at war with Islam, but Obama drove home the point in numerous ways: purging military and intelligence training materials of any mention of Islam in connection with terrorism; employing the might of the Justice Department to win special accommodation for Muslims in workplaces and schools; and lending the prestige and power of his administration to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s efforts to compel Western states to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Not a bad record for a self-described “Muslim Socialist,” however facetiously he meant the appellation. No wonder AP was embarrassed for him.

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