After approving the Navy SEALs’ mission to kill Osama bin Laden (or allowing Leon Panetta to approve it, as some reports indicate), Barack Obama has been in full retreat mode, doing everything he can to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Most notoriously, he ordered a full Muslim burial for Osama bin Laden, contradicting his own claim that bin Laden was “not a Muslim leader.”
Even worse, when Islamic groups started to complain about the fact that bin Laden was buried at sea, rather than on land in accordance with Islamic law, Obama took pains to assure the world that the American troops involved in the burial were “respectful of the body” of bin Laden.
The word “respectful” is all-important, because the sea burial had once again plunged those ever-fragile Islamic supremacists into a crisis of self-esteem. Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, a former resident of the United Kingdom who—until he left on a jaunt to Lebanon and wasn’t allowed back into the country—used to boast that one day the “black flag of Islam” would fly over 10 Downing Street, fulminated that “the Americans want to humiliate Muslims through this burial, and I don’t think this is in the interest of the U.S. administration.”
This is a man, mind you, who didn’t find anything “humiliating” about 3,000 dead Americans on 9/11. On the contrary, Muhammad celebrated the Islamic jihadist murderers of those Americans as “The Magnificent 19.” But of course, those dead were infidels—Bakri has apparently not picked up on the new theme from the Islamic supremacist propaganda machine in the U.S., that Muslims were killed in the twin towers’ collapse, and therefore a triumphal mosque at Ground Zero is altogether fitting and proper.
Another Islamic cleric, the Iraqi Sheikh Abdul-Sattar al-Janabi, warned about Osama’s sea burial that “what was done by the Americans is forbidden by Islam and might provoke some Muslims. It is not acceptable, and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea.”
Al-Janabi is not on record saying that the 9/11 attacks were “forbidden by Islam” or were “almost a crime.” But again, they were just infidels. The body of the great hero is another thing altogether.
And instead of telling these men and other outraged Muslims to take a long walk off a short pier, Barack Obama granted that they had a point, assuring the media that American personnel were “respectful of the body.” He thus demonstrated (yet again) that he was interested in taking pains not to “humiliate Muslims,” and that he was being careful not to do anything that was “forbidden by Islam and might provoke some Muslims,” much less anything that an Islamic cleric would classify as “almost a crime.”
In displaying such sensitivity, Obama wins no points in the Islamic world. He only appears as what he is, which is weak and unwilling to do what is necessary to defeat the Islamic jihad that will be in no way stopped by the death of Osama bin Laden.
In 1945, when Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his besieged Berlin bunker, German officials were careful to burn his body. They wanted to make sure his corpse didn’t fall into the hands of the Russians. They knew the Russians were not likely to give Hitler a respectful Aryan funeral, but would probably display his body as a trophy. Imagine if Hitler had been captured and killed by American troops. Can you envision FDR ordering that he be given a dignified funeral and burial?
Of course he would not have, for to have done so would have been to suggest some legitimacy to this genocidal monster’s actions, his life, and his legacy. And in saying (counterfactually) that Osama bin Laden was “not a Muslim leader,” Obama seems to have been trying to deny the al-Qaeda chief exactly that. So why then turn around and force American troops to endure the rites of the very religion that inspired bin Laden to commit mass murder in the first place?
It was no less absurd and insulting than the Americans’ burying Hitler with a Nazi flag draped over his coffin would have been in 1945. Obama owes the American people an apology.
