Barack Obama: The European President

The same statist, socialist ideology that has infected Europe and caused its decline has been touted by American progressives, (who are actually socialists but afraid to say so openly), for decades as what "social justice" demands.

This ideology is hostile to individual liberty, free speech, free markets, Christianity, traditional sexual morality, the sanctity of life and the rule of law. It values massive state bureaucracies as the solution to social problems, freedom only of politically correct speech, high rates of taxation and government regulation of business, Darwinism, sexual libertinism, easy access to abortion and euthanasia and rule by administrative law.

Europe is in the grip of the culture of death. Advocates of private killing are loud and dominant, while those who advocate for the poor, the weak and the vulnerable are marginalized. No country in Europe is having enough babies to prevent the population from dropping precipitously. Essentially, Europe is committing collective suicide - which is the end result of collectivism.

Barack Obama is the first "European" president of the United States, which is the only Western country that has so far put up a respectable fight against the culture of death. Obama is trying to turn the US into a European-style social democracy and overcome its Christian culture and he is in a hurry. The mask of centrist pragmatism that he wore during the campaign has fallen off and far left extremism is now plain (for anyone who does not have a vested interest in being deceived) to see.

Nowhere is this Europeanism more clear than in his foreign policy. As Rich Lowry of The National Review Online writes:

"The Obama administration says it won’t tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapon. It has given no one any reason to believe that. The credibility of the administration’s oft-stated intolerance for new Israeli residences, on the other hand, is intact and unassailable.

Over the issue of Israeli settlements, the administration is willing to force a diplomatic crisis. It is willing to berate and belittle. It is willing to give visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a reception at the White House icier than that granted the Salahis, the infamous party crashers. On settlements, Barack Obama is Churchillian, resisting them on the beaches, in the fields, and in the streets.

To call the administration’s reaction to the Israeli announcement of the next stage in planning for 1,600 housing units in Jerusalem disproportionate is a rank understatement. It’s perverse.

The housing is in north Jerusalem, in a historically Jewish neighborhood no negotiations have ever contemplated handing over to a Palestinian state. The Obama administration believes a cram-down of a settlement halt is the necessary first step to a negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, a doctrinal fixity impervious to contrary evidence.

The administration can’t even get the Palestinians to agree to talk with the Israelis directly, something that occurred routinely in the Bush years. The Palestinians understandably won’t negotiate so long as they believe the U.S. will strong-arm the Israelis into concessions.

It’s appropriate that Netanyahu came to Washington for his ritual humiliation — don’t let the side door of the White House hit you on the way out — simultaneous with the passage of health-care reform. The Europeanization of American domestic policy will proceed in tandem with — and eventually compel — the Europeanization of American foreign policy.

Like the Europeans, Obama is adopting the Arab narrative of the Middle East, wherein Israeli perfidy is responsible for all that ails the region. The administration’s broadsides against the Jewish state could have been delivered by Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb, who’s always up for a good chiding of the nasty Israelis."

The first sentence of that last paragraph is particularly disturbing. I am currently reading Bat Ye'or's lucid and disturbing book: Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2005 ,2006), which describes in great detail the process by which the Arab narrative of the Middle East has been adopted by Europe. In this narrative, Israel is an interloper in Arab territory.

But, one might ask, aren't Arabs from Arabia and don't they dominate Palestine only because of conquest? And does not Israel control its territory by re-conquest since they were there long before the Arabs and they conquered their territory in a defensive, just war against aggressors? So how is it more legitimately Arab land than Jewish land?

The sting in the answer to that question is that Palestine belongs to the Arabs only in the sense that all the earth "belongs" to Muslims since it is their "manifest destiny" or "eschatological mission" to rule the entire world. Europeans appear to be blase to the fact that, by accepting the Arab world's logic for why Israel should not exist in its present form, they are implicitly accepting the inevitable conclusion that Europe can only continue in the future as the "land of dhimmitude," that is, as land ruled by Islam.

America and Israel are demonized in the Arab world because they represent opposition to the Muslim dream of a world-wide empire. They resist bowing before Arab tyrants, or at least they did before Obama's world apology tour got going. Obama is the first European president because he is the first post-American president. In him the decline of the West finds its incarnation.