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When Obama made his long-awaited speech to the Muslim world on June 4, he was excruciatingly careful to demonize those Muslims he termed "violent extremists" and praise other practitioners of Islam. While the distinction is accurate, it is hardly insightful. While declaring Islam itself evil leads to a strategic cul de sac (what is the strategy once we declare one third of humanity our enemy); Obama's chosen path is equally dangerous. It allows the Muslim world to go on blaming their problems on "imperialism," "exploitation," or more innocuously poverty, and ratifies the consistently disastrous policy of letting those who cheer the terrorists' actions and provide them with ideological cover avoid responsibility. It lets them and the "violent extremists" off the hook in the name of political correctness.
Those same people have been engaged in a deliberate program of ethnic cleansing against Bangladesh's Hindus. Hindus were almost one in five Bangladeshis when the nation broke from Pakistan in 1971. Today, after decades of murder, rape, and forced conversion, they are less than one in ten. Using demographic models and other data, Professor Sachi Dastidar of the State University of New York, Old Westbury, estimates that 49 million Hindus are "missing" from the Bangladeshi population; that is more people than most nations have.
This is but one example of a long list
That is the danger in Obama's Cairo University speech and his policy of "outreach" to the Muslim world. Peace is nice; frank discussions are needed. But refusing to demand equal soul searching on the part of those who are in reality radical Islam's lifeline will produce neither and insure that his speeches will keep peace at a distance and create more victims.
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