Ira Stoll writes in Commentary that the speech was “awful.” Here is a rundown of his complaints.
1. The president exaggerated the number of Muslims in the United States:
Among the problems, one was the president’s claim that there are “nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today.” The true number is probably less than half that, as this page details.
Here is what that page says, relative to the point at issue (ital is mine):
Q. How many Muslims are in the United States?
A. According to an academic review of available survey-based data in 2001, informed by information provided by Muslim organizations and mosques, the highest reasonable total number of Muslims in the United States is 2.8 million.
A more realistic number, supported by statistically significant survey data comparable to what has been used to to calculate the sizes of other religious groups, is less than 2 million Muslims in the United States, or about 0.5% of the total population.
Estimates of the U.S. Muslim population of 6 million, 8 million, 10 million or more may indeed be correct, but are not supported by empirical data. Such numbers may best be understood as “spiritual” numbers, rather than actual numbers.
I haven’t a clue what is meant by “spiritual” numbers, but here is what the first hit at this Google search says (emphasis mine):
An exact figure of Muslim population in the United States is very difficult to make. The figures presented here are based on available data.
In the United States, there are essentially three categories of Muslims: 1) immigrants; 2) American converts/reverts to Islam; and 3) those born to the first two groups as Muslims.
The immigrant population of the United States is relatively easy to document because the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Census Bureau, and other government agencies have been keeping records of immigrants. In order to arrive at our figures, we researched the history of Muslim ethnic groups around the world and then determined their percentage as Muslim. We then correlated this percentage with the number of Muslims in the United States, which enabled us to determine the percentage represented in the overall population.
Determining the number of indigenous Muslims was more difficult. In most cases, records have not been kept by any single source. To arrive at the number of American converts to Islam, we had to look at various groups’ conversion rates and compare them against their mortality and fertility rates.
This is an on-going project, and AMC will keep the reader informed of new statistics through our quarterly publication, the AMC Report. The figures cited here represent a starting point for serious research on demographic data about the Muslim population of the United States.
In other words, a lot depends on how you define the term “Muslim.” Having issued this caveat, the site estimates the total number of Muslims in the United States at five million — three million over Ira Stoll’s estimate, and two million below Pres. Obama’s. And this study was put out in 1992.
Two things are clear — that the American Muslim population has grown significantly through the 20th century, and that there is no consensus on the total number.
Oh, and by the way, why does it matter so much?
2. The president used the words “pain” and “dislocation” in reference to Palestinians.
… This buys into the claim that it was 1948, not 1967, that was the original tragedy for the Palestinian Arabs, and feeds the idea that the Palestinian Arabs have a claim to all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza.
Setting aside the astonishing presumptuousness of Ira Stoll who is a Jewish American, not a Palestinian Arab, instructing the Palestinian people on how to define their own original tragedy, his statement here is clearly informed by present-day political considerations rather than any interest in historical truth. According to this line of thinking, if the United States acknowledges the reality of Nakba (The Catastrophe, which is how Palestinians refer to what happened to them in 1948), that will mean that Palestinians will insist on the Right of Return — the perceived right of Palestinians to return to their original land and homes. This is all or nothing, black and white thinking — it assumes that Palestinians are completely irrational and lacking in any capacity to understand their own self-interest now, in this time and place. However, there is no actual, tangible evidence to support the idea that Palestinians will reject any peace agreement that does not include this right to return. The issue of Jewish settlements is a much more serious stumbling block to peace — which makes Stoll’s suggestion that Palestinians do have a legitimate claim to the West Bank and Gaza quite disingenuous, given the fact that Israel’s definition of the West Bank as it relates to Palestinian homeland rights is just a tiny fraction of the West Bank as it existed before 1967. The portion of the West Bank that Israel would be willing to give to Palestinians in any peace agreement would have vast parts of it — the parts that have been taken over by Jewish settlers — sliced off and incorporated inside the Apartheid Wall — essentially stolen from the Palestinians, confiscated, appropriated.
3. The president equated Palestinians with American blacks, and posited a struggle for full rights and equality that is comparable to the civil rights movement in the United States. As if that were not bad enough, the president said that violence is a dead end!
Then he said, “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end.”
This places the Palestinian Arabs as the victims, equating their plight to that of enslaved American blacks, Poles subjected to Communist tyranny, or blacks under apartheid. In these analogies, the assumption, just barely left unsaid, is that Israeli Jews are the oppressors. Never mind that that doesn’t accurately portray the moral or historical situation. It isn’t even accurate. Violence is not a dead end. American slavery was ended by the Civil War. “America’s founding” was accomplished not by a peaceful insistence on ideals but by a war of independence. And, sadly, were it not for ongoing terrorist attacks against American and Israeli targets, President Obama would not be in Egypt comparing the Palestinian Arab cause to that of the captive nations of Eastern Europe or American blacks.
We have already established that there can only be one set of legitimate grievances — that the Jewish people and the Palestinian people cannot both, in some sense, be victims of historical circumstances. One side has to be the victims; the other side has to be the villains. Not much more I can say about that.
I understand that this new narrative on the right about the efficacy of violence is deeply felt. But the historical examples fall short. Going in chronological order, the American war of independence was exactly that — a war of independence. It was not an invasion or an occupation. It was not a civil war. It was a popular uprising — an armed struggle undertaken by people who were freeing themselves from an oppressive, tyrannical power. It was a war of self-defense, which is one of the few instances — if not the only instance — in which violence is not always a dead end.
As for the Civil War, it did end slavery, for the simple reason that the non-slave owning side won the war — the point being that the Civil War was not fought for the purpose of ending slavery. If the South had not insisted on expanding slavery into states where it did not originally (before the creation of the U.S. Constitution) exist, the Civil War might not have happened. Abraham Lincoln was entirely prepared to allow slavery to remain in the states where it had always existed — he was flatly opposed to slavery and thought it a great moral evil, but he was not an abolitionist. His overriding priority was to keep the Union intact, and he felt it was not possible to abolish slavery without violating the Constitution. The Civil War ended slavery only because white Southerners were unwilling to content themselves with having slavery in the states in which it already existed. They wanted to bring slavery to the newly constituted states as they joined the Union — and that tore the country apart and resulted in war.
The violence of that war was deeply traumatic for the nation and although it ended slavery it certainly did not bring anything close to equality for black Americans until well past the middle of the 20th century.
The end of the Civil War silenced the guns and ended de jure slavery, but it did not bring justice or even peace in the most meaningful sense. The resentments, tensions, and hatreds that existed before the Civil War were not alleviated by the war and in many ways were made worse. There were profoundly negative consequences that continue to this day. The South gained enormous political power as a result of the Civil War, and any number of political and social realities — from the Southern strategy to the Ku Klux Klan and numerous other white supremacist organizations — resulted.
Bottom line: It’s really mindless to put as much faith in violence as the right is increasingly doing.
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