Obama Does Not Get It

I recently had a conversation with an Iraqi friend of mine based in Baghdad who asked me a question that is not uncommon on the Arab street these days, "Is America ready for a black president?"

I did not know how to answer him in a manner where I would not sound like a brainwashed Americanized Iraqi, so I gave him a brief lecture on the history of Afro-Caucasian relations in the United States, from the days of slavery and up to the Civil Rights movement, through the civil war, and through Jim Crow. I told him that more Americans died during the civil war than any other war in which America has been engaged. It was only then when I told him that by and large Americans now see people as individuals and not as members of racial groups, that Americans have, with few unimportant exceptions, grown out of the black and white debate.

So yes, the America I have known and loved is more than ready for a black president, it just isn't ready for Obama.

There is a common Arabic saying that goes, "لكل زمان دوله ورجال" roughly meaning, "for each age, there is a different state and set of men." This age is that of terrorism, a global war waged by militant Islamists against, not just Americans and Europeans, but rather against everyone who does not share their bloody ideology. It is an age of one superpower, that superpower must, for the duration of this conflict be led by men and women who fathom the gravity of global Jihad.

A man like Obama who, in the heart of his heart thinks that modern Jihadists are products of the American occupation of Iraq are not fit for leadership. For the Jihadists, Iraq is just one stop in a series of destinations in pursuit of their ultimate goal of establishing or as they say resurrecting a caliphate where eight year old girls would be married off to sheikhs, where pagans and polytheists would be slaughtered, where music and poetry would be banned, where access to the outside world would be cut off, where liberals would be publicly hanged. I am not exaggerating, an Islamic caliphate would make Stalin's Soviet Union like modern day Norway.

The 44th President of this great union must be a man or a woman who would continue to keep the terrorists on the run, continue to support democratic forces in the Muslim world.

Forget about November as the clear choice then would be, John McCain, for now, I wholeheartedly endorse Senator Clinton against Obama.