President Barack Obama says 300 million Americans must accept a fractured and diverse America if they want to defeat Muslim terrorists.
“If extremists are peddling the notion that Western countries are hostile to Muslims, then we need to show that we welcome people of all faiths,” he said Wednesday, while quoting a letter he said he received from an 11-year-old Muslim girl living in the U.S.
The Muslim girl “is our hope … [and] our future,” he said, without mentioning the roughly 4 million Americans who are born each year.
“We discredit violent ideologies, by making sure her voice is lifted up; making sure she’s nurtured; making sure that she’s supported … [by] us staying true to our values as a diverse and tolerant society even when we’re threatened, especially when we’re threatened,” he said.
When Muslims are “succeeding and thriving” in the United States, “it reminds us all that hatred and bigotry and prejudice have no place in our country,” he told his audience of administration officials, Islamic advocates and foreign officials gathered at the White House for a conference on “Countering Violent Extremism.”
Obama, like many other progressives, supports government-imposed social variety, dubbed diversity, because it breaks up evolved social practices, such as live-and-let-live federalism, self-reliant independence from government, Christian social norms and solidarity, child-focused marriage, and traditional norms of sexual caution.
The imposed variety boosts social conflict, and reduces informal, non-government civic cooperation, according to a huge study of diversity’s impact on 30,000 people, by a Harvard professor, Robert Putnam.
American support for diversity is needed to refute jihadi claims that Americans mistreat Muslims, Obama said.
Americans don’t mistreat Muslims, Obama said, because “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”
“Generations of Muslim immigrants came here and went to work as farmers and merchants and factory workers, helped to lay railroads and build up America,” he said, without mentioning the Christian and European settlers who created the United States.
“The first Islamic center in New York City was founded in the 1890s. … In cemeteries across our country, including at Arlington, Muslim American heroes rest in peace having given their lives in defense of all of us,” he said, without offering any evidence that Muslim ideas had any impact at all on Americans’ culture or politics.
“That’s the story extremists and terrorists don’t want the world to know — Muslims succeeding and thriving in America. Because when that truth is known, it exposes their propaganda as the lie that it is,” Obama claimed.
“It’s also a story that every American must never forget, because it reminds us all that hatred and bigotry and prejudice have no place in our country,” he said, without identifying the claimed bigots and haters.
Those attitudes are “not just counterproductive. … It’s contrary to who we are,” he said, without offering evidence of support for diversity.
Since 2009, Obama has sharply increased diversity by boosting the inflow of Muslims immigrants, via several immigration programs, including the United Nations’ transfer of refugees from Somalia and Syria into the United Sates.
The immigrant Muslim population has grown by roughly 1 million since 2000, up to almost 2.7 million in 2013.
The inflow has coincided with a dramatic increase in jihadi attacks and jihadi plots. There were aimed at Americans in New York’s Twin Towers in 1993 and 2001, at the Pentagon, at Fort Hood in Texas, and Fort Detrick in New York, Times Square in New York, the 2013 Boston marathon and many other sites.
Since his inauguration in 2009, Obama has strenuously defended Islam from criticism, and justified his concessions to Muslim advocacy groups in the United States as vital to persuade immigrant Muslims from implementing the Koran’s repeated calls for warfare against non-Muslims.
Amid his demand for more diversity, Obama also offered himself up as the protector of Muslims in the United States, from supposed anti-Muslim “hate crimes.”
“Recently, with the brutal murders in Chapel Hill of three young Muslim Americans, many Muslim Americans are worried and afraid. … As Americans, all faiths and backgrounds, we stand with you in your grief and we offer our love and we offer our support.”
That offer of help to Muslims in America matches Obama’s recent efforts to bring Muslim political groups into his Democratic political coalition.
Obama underlined that pitch by calling for greater Muslim participation in government.
“If we’re going to solve these [terror] issues, then the people who are most targeted and potentially most affected — Muslim Americans — have to have a seat at the table where they can help shape and strengthen these [anti-jihadi] partnerships so that we’re all working together to help communities stay safe and strong and resilient,” he told his audience.
