In the confusion and the outreach and the appeal to Muslim self-esteem by misrepresenting both the texts and tenets of Islam not only to Muslims, but much more importantly and damagingly, to non-Muslims, the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (but in a more articulate and self-assured voice), does not know where to put its feet or hands. This summer, as the American soldiers withdraw from Iraqi cities, the country will again descend, not necessarily into all-out war, but into that natural Hobbesian state toward which any Muslim country without the firm hand of the army and the security services will naturally tend.

The violence and aggression in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, though directed outward, against non- Muslims, create within societies suffused with Islam what might be called the “atmospherics” of Islam. Among those “atmospherics” are such things as the unwillingness to truly compromise with enemies (Infidels or, within the Camp of Islam, with other groups of Muslims who are distinguished by sect or ethnicity and who, as enemies, not unnaturally tend to be regarded the way Muslims are taught to regard the cursed Infidels). This leads naturally to a view in which every agreement with enemies who can be depicted as Infidels is to be broken, and the only two possible states one ends up in as the result of any conflict are those of Victor and of Vanquished. And every game, if one or both players is Homo islamicus ludens, is always zero-sum.

Western notions of compromise on one side leading to corresponding compromises being elicited from the other, simply do not apply. That is why, for example, the belief that if Israel, after a long history of giving up tangible assets in the form of land, should now give up still more by stopping its “settlements” there will be a true “compromise” offered by the Arab Muslim side, and not merely a “truce treaty” or “hudna” based on the model of that made by Muhammad with the Meccans in 628 A.D. at Hudaibiyya, relies on such a false and therefore dangerous misreading of both the letter and spirit of Islam.

The misrepresentation of Islam in the Cairo speech, with all of its clumsy and transparent pandering to Muslim “self-esteem,” attempts (presumably deliberately) to misstate Islam to Muslims so that they themselves, now bucked up by such falsity, will themselves somehow overlook the real Islam. Instead, they will start to behave as a bunch of American speechwriters and Barack Obama, with his gravelly delivery, tell them Islam teaches them to behave. So do listen to 5.22, and do pay no attention to 5.33, and do forget about the duty to wage the struggle or “Jihad” to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. And do ignore what Islam teaches about the role of women, and do forget what Islam inculcates about the treatment of non-Muslims, and do this, and do that, because the Simple Simons of Washington have so instructed you that that is what, in their understanding, Islam now teaches you to do. Oh, why? Because we all simply must, because if we don’t somehow manage to do so, then where will we be, then what might be our responsibility to do ? And naturally, Muslims will wish to overlook such a little thing as what is actually in the Qur’an and Hadith, and what the life of Muhammad so abundantly illustrates, that life which is exemplary, the life of the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, and himself a mirror for Muslim magistrates and a Model for All Muslims for all time.

Let’s ignore, for the nonce, the embarrassing falsehoods delivered so stirringly by Barack Obama in Cairo. Let’s ignore the damage they do to the Western world, by seeming to endorse the very idea of misrepresenting Islam itself as a strategy for avoiding that absurdly named “clash of civilizations.” That clash is, in fact, merely the war that Islam makes on all that is non-Islam, and that all Muslims who take their Islam seriously are required to participate in, using whatever means — not necessarily violence, whether terrorism or conventional qitaal — come to hand and prove effective.

The confusion, based on ignorance of Islam, and the palpable want of intelligence and ruthless cunning and imagination among those who have been making policy in this area, and the now incredible, willful misreading of the recuperative powers of the Western world, has led to this speech. It is an updated equivalent to what Chamberlain and Daladier did, when they were in their time mired in end-of-our-tether confusion about what to do with, how to handle, Mr. Hitler and his National Socialists. The first thing that was tried was appeasement, an appeasement that not only was ineffective, and was understood — by all those who actually had closely followed Hitler and the Nazis — would have, and did have, terrible results. The policy degringolade — how many more tens or hundreds of billions to be squandered by the American government in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan? How much more demoralization of the American military? American officers and men know that there is a great disconnect between the goals they are supposedly working to achieve and the goals that make sense based on their own unstudied experiences with Muslim peoples. That includes the supposed “allies” who are always so creative in finding new ways to get more, and then still more, money and weaponry and every sort of advantage they can from those Americans who, at the top back in Washington, appear to ordinary officers and men so incredibly gullible, so completely uncomprehending of what these Muslim peoples are like in their deep unyielding hostility to Americans and other Infidels, even if they are quick to smile, these past masters at picking American pockets, and ask for — as always — the equivalent of “a Marshall Plan.” (It’s the best-known phrase in the current Arab and Muslim lexicon of English — “Marshall Plan.”)

So let’s try to work our way out of this mess, this policy degringolade.

There are two things that must be done, by the American and other Western governments, and that take precedence over all else, when it comes to preventing still further danger for the non-Muslim world — not just the United States, not just the United States and Canada and Western Europe, and not just the United States and Canada and Western Europe and Israel and Australia and India and all the other Infidel lands threatened from without or even from within, by the forces of those who take their Islam to heart, but all over the world.

Here they are:

1) Prevent Muslim states, Muslim peoples, Muslim groups, Muslim groupuscules from acquiring major weaponry, of the kind we call weapons of mass destruction. Or when they have, out of the criminal negligence of those who claim to protect and instruct us, been allowed to acquire such weaponry (as in the case of Pakistan), they must be prevented from acquiring the means to deliver it, or to pass it off to others.

Right now the American government is frantic, in Pakistan, because it fears that a group of fanatical Sunni Muslims might take control of the government. That government is now run by Muslims, a ruling class of alternating or power-sharing zamindars and generals, whose inculcated hostility to all Infidels, and hence to the West, is slightly less pure, its Islam slightlyl more diluted, than that of those fanatical Sunni Muslims, the Taliban, who are the alternative — though even that misunderstood relative “moderation” can always vanish, overnight.

Meanwhile, in Iran, fanatical Muslims — these being different from the Taliban mainly in being Shi’a — already control the government (as the fanatics do not yet control Pakistan), and show no signs of being replaced. But what they lack (in contradistinction to Pakistan) is the weaponry. And it is that that they are so determinedly building.

And the American government so far appears unwilling to assume its responsibility, as a world power, and as the leader of the non-Muslim world, to destroy that nuclear project — not by “invading” Iran, not by any huge movement of troops into Iran, but by missiles and planes to do what only tiny, beleaguered, and brave Israel is willing on its own to do. The American government is not only unwilling to assume its own responsibilities (out of fear of somehow “damaging” the splendid American effort — utterly trivial by comparison with Iran — in Iraq, and also idiotically convinced that Iran must be wooed so as to help in Afghanistan, forgetting that Shi’a Iran has its own good reasons to fear the ascension of the Uber-Sunni Taliban in that country), but does everything it can to deny Israel the wherewithal, the tools and the intelligence, that it needs to set back, on its won, the Iranian project, as it once set back, by decades, that in Iraq.

2. Halt, and then work to reverse, through the adoption of measures that an intelligent self-defense both justifies and requires, Muslim immigration to, and campaigns of Da’wa within, the lands of Infidels, that is, in Dar al-Harb. Barack Obama thinks he knows all about Islam. After all, his father, who left when he was two, “was a Muslim.” And, after all, he, Barack Obama, lived in largely-Muslim Indonesia from the ages of 6 to 9. And after all, he, Barack Hussein Obama, bears a name that is Muslim. And what’s more, he can salaam-aleikum with the best of them. He is akin to a friend of mine, whose father received a doctorate in biophysics decades ago, and who has grown up in a family where his brothers and sisters are all in science, but he himself knows nothing — not one thing — about science. Yet he is convinced that he understands science, that he doesn’t have to study even elementary biology, or physics, or chemistry, because, you see, he has “picked it up from the environment.” He’s quite convinced, though he is already at sea in the first paragraph of any article in “Scientific American.” He chooses to ignore his own bewilderment because “I come from a family of scientists.”

His comical certainty about his “understanding science” by familial osmosis is not much different from that of Barack Obama with Islam. His father called himself a Muslim, but was apparently a practitioner of what was, a half-century ago, an easygoing, syncretistic, sub-Saharan version, the kind that before Saudi money came in to redo the mosques and madrasas, and subsidize the Wahhabi imams, could still be found. And Obama also spent three childhood years — ages 6 to 9 — in Indonesia, in a school that, tellingly, contained both Muslim and Christian children (which meant that the Muslim parents had to be the kind, found in every Muslim capital, who are — if not secret secularists — at least those who recognize the insufficiencies of Muslim schools and long for their Muslim children to be exposed to, and get what they can, offered outside the mental prison of Islam). Obama shows no signs — not now, and not earlier — of having studied the texts and tenets of Islam. Being able to say “salaam aleikum” or remembering how nice the azan sounded in Jakarta just won’t do, just isn’t the same thing. He has not read, and re-read, and studied, and thoroughly assimilated, the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Sira. He has not read, and re-read, Schacht or Snouck Hurgrinje, Lammens or St. Clair Tisdall, Vajda or K. S. Lal, or a hundred other real scholars, but has relied on the latter-day likes of the grasping espositos or the less venal true believers: those Muslims who carefully explain Islam not to other Muslims (when they do that, and think Infidels are not eavesdropping, then truth-telling is the rule) but to Infidels, so that they will be deeply misled. It’s okay: “War is deception.” It’s okay: Taqiyya is the doctrine of religiously-sanctioned dissimulation about the Faith of Islam. It’s okay: Kitman, the practice of “mental reservation” where a Muslim deliberately holds things back, offers the same, and both taqiyya (which originates in the need for Shi’a Muslims to protect themselves against Sunni persecution) and kitman find their textual support in the Qur’an itself.

The Speech in Cairo should be dissected line by line by those who are well-prepared and not merely by the too-easily-pleased, the analysts who are unafraid to be superficial because they can count on their audiences to be even more superficial, and careless of detail, and ignorant of, inattentive to, the fact.

Obama’s speech was a farrago of misunderstood passages from the Qur’an, highly selective quotation, and complete omission of a great deal — the more than 100 Jihad verses in the Qur’an, with not one Hadith quoted among the thousands that inculcate the idea of permanent hostility between Muslims and Infidels, and not a single detail from the Sira. It was an appalling performance, one that will mislead Infidels, and one that forces many of the confused to think that, after all, “the American government must surely know what it’s doing.” It warmed the cockles of CAIR’s heart. It was grotesque. And as it is analyzed, and more of its misunderstandings and incidental sillinesses and historical misreadings come out, it will stand as a monument to ignorance and nonchalance.

And if enough of us, the Infidels, read the texts, read the Western scholars who wrote before the Age of Inhibition set in (round about 1970), read and listen to the growing army of articulate apostates (Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, and a hundred others), and even visit Islamic websites, we will come to understand that Islam merely inculcates rules, and does not allow for questioning. Islam insists that Believers are “slaves of Allah.” Every question, once the answer is given, admits of no pondering and no moral wrestling. The usual ending is, for Infidels so frightening, that “Allah Knows Best.”