A-Words

Almost immediately after he was elected in 2008, Barack Obama embarked on what conservatives derisively call the "Apology Tour." The newly elected president traveled to Cairo and gave a major speech intended to "reset" our relationship with Islam. After all, Obama contended that George W. Bush had destroyed that relationship with war, and Obama would make an accommodation and ultimately, bring peace. That would, progressives insisted, cause Islam to moderate, to accept our differences, and to move toward a more peaceful world. It hasn't worked out very well.

But Obama persisted. He championed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarek in Egypt, Mohamar Kaddafi in Libya, and advocated the overthrow of Syria's anti-Islamist dictator, Bashar Assad. He insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood was "moderate," and that equally moderate elements would bring Egypt, Libya, and Syria into the world of democratic nations. That didn't work out very well, either.

Last week, he condemned the barbaric palestinian attack on a Synagogue in Jerusalem, as palestinians celebrated the deaths of Jewish worshippers in the West Bank and Gaza. But his condemnation was characteristically soft—he never called out the palestinians, but rather provided a generic condemnation of "violence."

After all, we have to bring Muslims around and act in ways that will cause them to like us, to act less aggressively, to accept our differences. Don't we?

A commenter, "harrywr2" at Richard Fernandez' Belmont Club, posted an interesting observation. In essence, he argued that there are three states that can occur when competing civilizations or ideologies come into conflict: accommodation, assimilation, or annihilation.

Barack Obama is a man of the left, and when the West and Islam compete, he, like virtually all of his fellow leftists, has chosen accommodation. But accommodation is not a persistent state, it is, as "harrywr2" states:

... only a 'resting place' that may result in assimilation but has just as frequently been a resting place before returning to conflict.

So that leaves assimilation, and it is a workable approach, but only when both civilizations are ... well .... civilized. When one civilization acts barbarically and/or intolerantly, it is difficult to assimilate them in a more civilized society, and it is deadly when the more civilized society makes any attempt to integrate with the barbarians. "harrywr2" comments:

The fundamental problem of multiculturalism is that it is an accommodation that hasn't been demonstrated to result in assimilation.

Celebrating both Hanukkah and Christmas are fine...as long of the Jewish Boy and The Christian girl are allowed to marry and freely choose whether they want their children to be Jewish, Christian, or none of the above.

Unfortunately...Islam has many rules that are 'anti-assimilation ...

That would leave only one A-word as a predictor of a very dark future.

But there is another A-word that may come into play—absorption. Due to low birth rates in some European countries, Islam has a significant demographic advantage. For example, it may very well be that France—its culture, its people, and its history—will be absorbed into a French Islamic Republic within the next three decades. The question is—how will that absorption occur, peacefully or with great pain? Will all French people (who remain) be forced to convert to Islam or pay the Dhimmi tax demanded in the Koran? Will France as an Islamic Republic adopt Sharia Law and encourage violence again other European countries not so far along? Will some Frenchmen resist absorption and become guerrilla fighters in their own right, battling against a repressive Islamist ideology? No one knows.

A-words. Where Islam is concerned, it appears that none of them can result in a happy ending.