He admitted the media made it look bad.
I found a clip. He says it right about 2:12. (And don't you love the tough interviews he gets? Starts out with "Supporters say you look exhausted. Are you exhausted?" Should have offered him a pillow.)
Yeah, it is a matter of "you break it, you buy it."
I wonder if Obama will keep blaming Bush for stuff after he leaves office, like for the rest of his life. "Honey, did you forget to take out the trash again?" "Michelle, you have to understand the situation I inherited..."
The fanatics are responsible for fanatics, not Muslims in general.
The religion is responsible for the fanatics.
Here's the thing. What terrorists are doing does represent Islamic civilization. When Obama refers to acts on the part of the West, he is not referring to acts of individuals or terrorists he is referring to policies of state. Let's look at what he actually said:
You're just separating men acting with government titles from men acting without government titles. History is made by individual people, as are policies of state. Ships don't sail across seas by themselves, neither do airplanes fly into buildings by themselves. If terrorists don't represent Islamic civilization, then neither does black slavery represent American civilization.
"We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world -- tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam."
The first two statements talk about age old tensions but neither side is specifically blamed. It is the latter statements which are significant here, the reference to colonialism which doesn't begin until the end of eighteenth century but becomes most prominent after WWI and later of Cold War policies. He is not going back to ancient history.
Of course he can't go back to ancient history, he's an American president and America's not that old.
But he is blaming one side. In the first sentence - he mentions tensions "beyond any current policy debate". Policy debate is obviously referring to American policy. There is no "policy" on the terrorist side unless you call death and destruction a policy. So he's indicating that there is some American policy which would reduce the current tensions. It's laying the blame/responsibility on America, as if whether we continue to be terrorized depends upon which way our policy debate turns out.
Anyway what is the first part about - tensions between the U.S. and "Muslims around the world"? There would be no tensions but for the Middle Eastern ones killing people, and as for the others - I didn't know Muslims outside the Middle East had any serious beef with the U.S. Unless it has something to do with having the religion in common. Yeah, must be the religion.
As to the latter statements, it's just convenient for you to arbitrarily distinguish between history and ancient history. You know Muslims LOVE that history you're calling ancient history. But it's important that within the paragraph he switches from talking of "America" to "the West". They can be spoken of as one if you're talking about something they have in common, but not if you're talking about Middle Eastern colonization.
And the suicide bombers, generally young men in their 20's that end their own lives - they don't give their lives over Cold War policies. They don't know anything about policy other than what is propagandized to them by hateful religious leaders. Again, it's the religion.
The last sentence I find really interesting. He's echoing what Netanyahu said when he spoke of "the clash between modernity and medievalism". What's interesting is that, just taking one element of my church - the liturgy - we use a liturgy which is centuries older than Islam. People make jokes about how we've never change our traditions and how adverse we are to doing so. Yet there's no clash between Orthodoxy and modernity. That's enough to tell you that Islam just has lousy traditions. But of course the statement isn't the whole truth, because it's not just the modern world; Islam didn't like the ancient world any better. Islam has always clashed violently with everything around it, before it was old enough to even have formed traditions. Right from the beginning, they made war when they were able to, they made peace when they needed to.
i see, so you want to go back to ancient history. Slavery in the Islamic world was not nearly as horrific as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Forcibly drafting a twelve year boy and then training him to become the governor of a province may have been traumatic but it certainly wasn't a brutal was what Europeans did to Africans who they enslaved to grow sugar, working them 18 hours a day then chaining them to their beds at night. And referring to Muslim Spain as Jim Crow Andalusia is an anachronism if there ever was one. Segregation was not imposed on Christians and Jews, it simply allowed them to govern themselves by their own rules. I once asked Fernández-Armesto, the renowned historian of Muslim Spain, whether there were more Muslims or Christians in Islamic in Islamic Spain and he told me that was difficult to determine because among the lower classes the two religions had become so intermixed that often individuals didn't know which was their own community.
In any case, Obama wasn't apologizing for ancient history, he was apologizing for things that were done in our own lifetime.
Islamic slavery was much more horrific. I wonder if as a Bahai if you don't have some bias. My goodness, Wikipedia whitewashes everything Islamic and even it is more forthcoming than you sometimes!
