A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Truth before Reconciliation

Liberal columnist and renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens has written another poignant piece for Slate today, and in it Hitchens points out that President Obama's recent Euro Trip '09 lacked a few key ingredients for it to have been considered a success. Chief among these is something called "the truth."

The limitations of the Obama manner were exposed in his address to the Turkish parliament and his press conference with the Turkish leadership. The president did not take the opportunity to reiterate his principled stand on the Armenian genocide that we are commemorating this month and took refuge in platitudes about healing and negotiation. It's not as if the Turks don't know what he thinks, so it's difficult to see the value of undue reticence. And it's hardly an that, in all successful attempts at settling accounts with the past in other nations, the word reconciliation has invariably been preceded by the word truth. The first duty is to stop lying. Only then can any genuine attempt at settlement get under way.

It was also somewhat naive of Obama to deny that the United States is "or ever will be" at war with Islam. Of course, one cannot exactly make war on a faith, most especially a faith that is currently undergoing a civil war within itself, in which Turkey has several times been attacked by Bin Ladenist forces. But twice in the past, jihad has been officially proclaimed from Turkey's capital. It was in the name of the Quran that the piratical Ottoman provinces known as the Barbary States took hundreds of thousands of American and European voyagers into slavery in the 18^th century, until Thomas Jefferson dispatched the fleet and the Marines to put down the trade, and it was from Constantinople that the Ottoman military alliance with German imperialism in 1914 was proclaimed as a holy war binding on all good Muslims. In other words, what one really wants is an assurance that Islam is not, nor ever will be, at war (again) with the United States.