Andrew C McCarthy - The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

A nd so he bowed.

Barack Hussein Obama swept into the royal reception hall. With the election won and power assumed, it was suddenly all right to hype Hussein again, and the new president had adjusted accordingly. All successful politicians are manipulators of language, of course, but even masters of the game had to marvel at Obamas prowess. This wasnt just the routine squaring of equal protection with affirmative action or transforming abortion into choice. This guy had actually managed to morph his own name from calling card to epithet and back in nothing flat, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which, for him, it was. No wonder that even here, in Buckingham Palace, he was the center of rapt attention, as he had been for each of the seventy-two days since his inauguration. In fact, it had been this way ever since his improbable run caught fire two years before. Suddenly, his purposeful strut came to a halt. Then it happened, for all to see.

The 44th President of the United States of America bowed deeply, reverentially, before King Abdullah bin Abdul Azziz, Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques, the absolute monarch of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The prostration was all the more shocking beneath these vaulted ceilings. The leaders of the worlds richest nationsmostly Western democracies along with Abdullahs police statewere in London for the G-20 Summit. They were hobnobbing cordially but, unlike Americas president, with their amour-propre very much intact along the gilded walls, bedecked by portraits of Britains heroes.

What could Obama have been thinking instead? That there was an American presidency owed to sheer defiance of this majestic setting. That there was a United States owed to Americas exceptionalismthe historically unique determination, forged in the blood of patriots, to refuse submission to a tyrannical power. This history is the steel in Americas backbone. It is why United States presidents look foreign royalty straight in the eye, with a dignity befitting leadership of the worlds most powerful, most munificent, most freedom-loving nation. They dont bow.

Obama had seemed to grasp thatat least when it came to the United Kingdom, that bastion of Western imperialism so reviled by his Kenyan Marxist forebears. At their first encounter the day before, the president had appropriately greeted Queen Elizabeth II with a steady handshake, while his wife pressed self-regard to the point of impropriety, presuming a huggy familiarity with the sovereign. Michelles faux pas, endured with characteristic grace by the queen, might have faded unnoticed if not for Obamas other flashes of indifferenceno, of hostilityto the sensibilities of Americas staunchest ally. For this president, it was plainly not a priority to reaffirm the special Anglo-American relationship, long the linchpin of global security. That was the old order under Western leadership, the order this herald of change had come to dismantle.

In his first days in office, the new president expelled from the White House a bronze bust of Winston Churchill, lent to the United States by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Stunned British diplomats implored the new administration to keep this symbol of trans-Atlantic solidarityas British soldiers continued fighting side-by-side with their American allies in the war on terror. Curtly, Obama staffers told them there was no room in the White Houses 55,000 square feet for it.

Shortly afterwards, Obama hosted Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Washington with a jarring lack of ceremony. Brown, like Obama, is a committed man of the Left, and one whose Labour government then teetered on the brink. No matter: no state dinner, no customary joint press conference, and no show of support. The president, moreover, was downright bizarre in the exchange of gifts between heads of state. He bestowed on the prime minister a set of American movie DVDs that were not formatted to play on British machines. And what would a new presidentveteran of less than four years in the Senate (most of which were spent campaigning for higher office)give Elizabeth II, queen for over a half-century of the United Kingdom and what are now fifteen sovereign states? Why, an iPod loaded with recordings of some of Obamas favorite speechesby Obama, of course.

It was differentvery differentwith Abdullah.

As the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a cluster of diplomats looked on, agog, Obama prostrated himself waist-deep before the grinning, eighty-four-year-old Saudi despot with an ostentation that rendered even more laughable than usual the evasions of Robert Gibbs, the White House press-secretary, who dutifully accused the videotape of lying.

Didnt the post-racial new president know that Saudia Arabia was still officially in the slave trade when Obama had been born in 1961 (and that the practice has been unofficially indulged ever since)? Through a series of post-World War I routs, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, then the family dynast, cobbled the Kingdom together from former British protectorates and the last vestiges of what had been Ottoman domination of the Arabian Peninsula. Still ruled today by the House of Saud, it is one of the worlds most repressive, discriminatory, anti-Semitic regimes. It is, furthermore, a regime that, since the 1960s, has spent tens of billions of dollars on a sedulous campaign to undermine American constitutional democracy.

The place is a money-machine rather than a forgotten desert wasteland due to the discovery of vast oil reserves, finally developed in the 1950s by the U.S. and the U.K.the Saudis having been too backwards to do the job themselves, then too narrow-minded to build a diverse, productive economy once theyd appropriated the American and British handiwork. Oil is Americas economic lifeblood, and as the United States shifted over the decades from net producer to net importer, American presidents had taken to blandishing Saudi royals with red-carpet attentions. Thats distasteful, but it neither explains nor is on a par with Obamas subservient display: The new presidents supplication occurred with oil prices in free-fall during a global recession.