A blog I read from time to time, Arlene [Kushner] in Israel, twigged me to this story:
The United States ambassador to Spain recently met with a group of Muslim immigrants in one of the most Islamized neighborhoods of Barcelona to apologize for American foreign policymaking in the Middle East.
U.S. Ambassador Alan Solomont told Muslims assembled at the town hall-like meeting in the heart of Barcelona’s old city that the United States is not an “enemy of Islam” and that U.S. President Barack Obama wants to improve America’s image in the Middle East as quickly as possible by closing the “dark chapters” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
“There are things that the United States has done badly,” Solomont said at the February 28 gathering organized by a non-profit organization called the Cultural, Educational and Social Association of Pakistani Women. “But now the Obama government wants to improve relations with Muslims,” he promised.
…
The U.S. State Department — working through American embassies and consulates in Europe — has been stepping-up its efforts to establish direct contacts with largely unassimilated Muslim immigrant communities in towns and cities across Europe.
Proponents of Obama’s approach to public diplomacy — some elements of which originated with his immediate predecessor — say it is part of a “counter-radicalization” strategy which aims to prevent radical Muslims with European passports from carrying out terrorist attacks against the United States.
A key component of the strategy is to “empower” Muslims who can help build a “counter-narrative” to that of terrorists. In practice, however, Obama ideologues are crisscrossing Europe on U.S. taxpayer funded trips to “export” failed American approaches to multiculturalism, affirmative action, cultural diversity and special rights for minorities.
Further, American diplomats are repeatedly apologizing to Muslims in Europe for a multitude of real or imagined slights against Islam, and the U.S. State Department is now spending millions of dollars each year actively promoting Islam — including Islamic Sharia law — on the continent.
There’s one main problem with this approach: it’s hard to convince Moslems we’re their friends when we’re killing them. We may be justified in killing them (we are); we may observe that the Moslems we’re killing are the biggest killers of other Moslems (they are); but as the recent killings in Toulouse have reaffirmed, apologies and self-recrimination, let alone reason, do not make you popular among a radicalized ideology with which you are at war.
You may be surprised to learn that the European nations where Obama is doing this outreaching do not appreciate his meddling:
Ambassador William Eacho, an Obama campaign fundraiser turned political appointee, awarded the first prize to a group of students in the northern Austrian town of Steyr who produced a one-minute silent film promoting tolerance for Muslim women who wear Islamic face-covering veils such as burkas in public spaces.
Obama and his team may think they know what is best for Europeans, but according to recent polls, more than 70% of Austrians are in favor of a law that would ban the burka.
In Belgium, U.S. Ambassador Howard Gutman, another Obama fundraiser turned diplomat, told lawyers attending a conference in Brussels in November 2011 that Israel is to blame for Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe.
According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot, Gutman, who is Jewish, showed conference attendees a video of himself receiving a warm welcome at a Muslim school in Brussels, which he said proved that Muslims are not anti-Semitic. Following a barrage of criticism for rationalizing the growing problem of anti-Semitism in Europe, the U.S. Embassy in Belgium removed the evidence by uploading an amended transcript of Gutman’s remarks on its website.
In France, the U.S. Embassy in Paris co-sponsored a seminar to teach Muslims in France how they can politically organize themselves. Operatives from the Democratic Party coached 70 Muslim “diversity leaders” from disaffected Muslim-majority suburban slums known as banlieues on how to develop a communications strategy, raise funds and build a political base.
The French government — which has been trying to reverse the pernicious effects of decades of state-sponsored multiculturalism — expressed dismay at what it called “meddling.”
I’ll bet they did—especially after Toulouse.
Europeans dismissed Bush as a “cowboy”. What is Obama, but a boy? (We pause here for the requisite outrage at using a racially tinged word. I use it not in that context—obviously—but to seize the theme of his naiveté, his cluelessness.)
As Aggie reports below, we had this maggot in our custody in Afghanistan—where we were killing one brand of Moslem to save another—but handed him over to the French. Okay.
PS: The Toulouse killings were no different from the slaughter in Itamar of the Fogel family—children massacred in the name of Arab nationalism—but who besides the Israelis mourns them?
PPS: Oh, this is Smart Power! Why didn’t you say so?
