Much has been made of the fact that President Obama speech was so overtly reverent of Islam and Islamic history in his Cairo speech. In the June 9 Washington Times Frank Gaffney makes the argument that Obama should be termed America’s first “Muslim” president” the way Bill Clinton was America’s first “Black” President.
While Gaffney’s arguments are salient, I would posit that it was less the triumph of Obamaist Islam [or Muslim Obamaism?] as it was a triumph of Saidism: that is, the acceptance of Edward Said’s theses of “Orientalism” and the concomitant necessity of the West to accommodate itself to the Eastern cultures it had “misrepresented” and “oppressed” for its own benefit. One might notice a correlation between the election of a [true] Black US President and the implementation of a type of “affirmative action” vis-à-vis the Islamic world based on Said’s proscriptions, among other things.
A better explanation might be found in two books by Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within and Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Bawer, a gay man who moved originally to Amsterdam with his partner in the 1990’s due to fears that the Christian Right was going to turn America theocratic, found that Europe seemed to have resigned itself to an inevitable Islamic takeover of the continent, and the elites enforcing the rigid doctrines of political correctness seemed to be positioning themselves for favorable treatment in an eventual Eurabia.
One might wonder whether US policy is leaning in this direction. The only other explanation I can think of is that, by making accommodating overtures to the Muslim world, Obama hopes that the religion will “reform” and “Westernize” itself, much as Christianity did. However, when one remembers that a) it took Christianity nearly two millennia to do that and b) in this regard, Islam has been unmistakably devolving, one wonders if this has truly crossed anyone’s mind.
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