Obama’s ‘Golden’ Standard for Religion Destroys ‘Peaceful Islam’ Myth

A clear trend emerges when President Obama discusses religion. When discussing Islam, it is within the sole context of a “peaceful religion.” When discussing other religions, it is within the context of their once having fostered hatred and violence, as he said at the National Prayer Breakfast and the Summit to Counter Violent Extremism (SCVE).

Obama’s Prayer Breakfast speech proffered the Crusades as an example of Christian violence (“people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ”). He failed to note that many Crusade battles involved Christians defending themselves against Muslim aggression, which initiated the Crusades.

At the SVCE, Obama again hit the “all-religions-possess-equal opportunity haters” theme: “…acts of violence have been committed against people of different faiths, by people of different faiths…”

The media has irresponsibly failed to challenge Obama’s claim that global “violent extremism” today is not linked directly to Islam alone, even after he gave a “gold standard” for measuring a religion’s equanimity that Islam fails.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama referenced “one law… [binding] people of all faiths… that we should treat one another as we wish to be treated”—i.e., the “Golden Rule.”

Unbeknownst to Obama, a religious scholar had conducted such an analysis of Islam—reaching a most disturbing conclusion. Dr. Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam analyzed the Quran to see whether it met this test, analyzing all elements of the text which dealt with “Islam’s vision and treatment of the kafir,” or unbelievers. Using the “kafir” as the index for how the Quran requires Muslims to treat “others,” he determined 61% of the Quran’s contents are devoted to this topic. Within that percentage, almost the entirety of the text “says the kafir is hated by Allah, that Allah plots against the kafir, Allah deceives the kafir.  It goes on the say the kafir can be tortured, killed, robbed, deceived.”

Dr. Warner’s finding destroys the myth Islam is peaceful. It underscores an enormous gap existing between Islam and all other religions—one inherent in Islam that Obama refuses to address. Bridging it by a universal application of the Golden Rule is impossible.

In 1948, all U.N. member states unanimously adopted (except for a Saudi Arabian abstention), a gold standard for human life—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which states:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

In 1969, 57 Muslim nations, seeking a “collective voice of the Muslim world,” formed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). At fundamentalist Iran’s urging, the OIC later limited its UDHR support only to that recognized under sharia law—i.e., rights for Muslims (primarily males) but none for non-Muslims.

The OIC tried to defend this position as UDHR “complementary”—a ludicrous claim rejected by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council.

While sharia denies human rights to non-Muslims—dismissing them as less than human—it severely limits such rights and freedoms even for Muslims themselves.

Islamic human rights, by definition, undermine universal human rights. It is no wonder then why application of the Golden Rule for Islam requires removing almost two-thirds of the Quran’s contents to be compliant.

While Obama continues to defend Islam, arguing groups like ISIS have “perverted” it, he fails to understand the source for this perversion stems from an uncomfortable truth—Islam itself perverts human rights.

This message comes, not from those he accuses of perverting Islam, but from the “collective voice” of 57 Muslim OIC member states strongly embracing it.