(First published in the Vallejo Times-Herald) 

President Obama’s message to the radical Muslim world’s leaders, he said, is that they will be judged by their people for what they build and not by what they destroy.

Well, it seems to me that on the one hand he’s right about that, though not necessarily in the way he meant.

And he’s also completely wrong.

The Muslim world is judging its leaders by what they’ve built, all right. They’re judging them on the terrorist network they’ve built — a vast network that spans the globe and operates almost with impunity. It’s managed to terrify entire nations into giving in, a little at a time, to Islamic demands.

They’re also being judged on the unrivaled propaganda machine they’ve built. It’s an apparatus that uses every conceivable cynical means to its end — it’s end being the destruction of Israel, the Jews, the Christians and the West in general.

This machine is succeeding beyond anything the West itself might have thought possible because, I think, the Islamo-fascists know us better than we know ourselves, and infinitely better than we know them.

They know, for instance, that the West can be made to commit hara-kiri at the mere suggestion that we are somehow infringing on someone’s human rights. Since this is not a burden with which the Islamo-fascists themselves are saddled, I’m sure they find it amusing to watch us take to the streets demanding Israel’s destruction for civilian deaths in Gaza which were, in fact, engineered by Hamas fighters firing from civilian centers in the hope of provoking a response for exactly that purpose.

The Islamo-fascists propaganda machine is also functioning to create the impression throughout the West that not bowing to its will is tantamount to denying their religious and human rights.

For a group for whom human rights is Jewish-created nonsense, they seem to me to spend a lot of time demanding it from the West while simultaneously denying it to anyone not Muslim. They seem also to deny it to Muslims who step out of their very strict prescribed line of permissible behavior and thought.

And the West’s reaction is as interesting as it is really scary.

It’s a phenomenon similar to that which allows the Muslim world and its Western supporters to demand a Jew-free “Palestine,” and to deny equal rights to Jews and Christians in nearly all 40-plus of the world’s predominantly Muslim nations, while the very idea of an Arab-free Israel is universally condemned as racist.

In fact, they have built a nearly universally accepted lie that Zionism — defined as the idea of a Jewish state in ancient Israel and Judea — is racist by nature. This, even though it is the world’s only Jewish country, in which more than 1 million Arabs live. This despite its being surrounded by more than 20 Arab Muslim countries, some of which don’t permit Jews even visit, let alone to live there. These countries, however, are not racist. Go figure.

What the Islamo-fascists have built is massive and it’s working, and the Arab street is indeed judging its leaders by this and finding them empowering.

In that way, Obama is right.

On the other hand, he’s wrong about their not judging their leaders on what they destroy. They judge them on that, too, and also, if their reaction to destruction is any indication, find that immensely satisfying, as well.

Who can forget the images of the Palestinians dancing and handing out candy after the attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001? Radical Islamic culture celebrates death and destruction. It’s why they do so much of it. It’s why they believe that to raise a child to die while murdering a Jew or an American is an express ticket to paradise. It’s why the greatest thing to which one can aspire in that culture, is to destroy life — their own and their victims’ — and such killers are glorified in image and song.

See, Obama is wrong. The leaders of the radical Muslim world are also judged by what they destroy. In fact, what they build is, mostly, all about what they can destroy.

It’s a completely different world view, and unless more of us catch on to that, I’m afraid we’d better get used to it.

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