Salaam = a very low bow or obeisance.

Raymond Ibrahim writes at Front Page:

Who can deny this? Whether by expunging any reference to Islam in U.S. security documents, or enabling Muslim persecution of Christians, or ordering NASA to make Muslims “feel good” about themselves, or bowing to the anti-Christian Saudi king—the President has made his partiality for Islam very clear: Islam is undoubtedly getting a “free pass” under Obama.

While Islam wages war against the US and the whole non-Islamic world, the President of the US gives Islam “a free pass”. To say the least. Seems to us he is positively and actively supporting  and promoting Islam.

What is that word for the crime of aiding the enemy in a time of war?

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Bruce Bawer writes, also at Front Page:

A Muslim somewhere on this planet asserts that the burning of a copy of the Koran thousands of miles away causes him indescribable, excruciating personal torment. And in a world awash in authentic reasons for emotional distress, this statement is taken not as a baldfaced lie …

Which it is …

but as a sincere expression of legitimate anguish worthy of the attention of … the President of the United States of America.

In short, the Western world – the civilized, modern world, the world built on the pillars of reason and Enlightenment values – has, in recent years, in the name of multiculturalism, decided to react with respect to statements and behaviors that we would laugh off as patently nonsensical if they originated from within our own civilization. …

Apologies flow like Niagara – apologies by everyone from the President on down: generals, ambassadors, cabinet officials. And the more ardent and numerous and overblown the apologies we offer this time for the present “offense,” the more “sensitive” the “offended” parties become, so that the next time they identify an excuse to take offense, the louder their cries of purported anguish will be and the more violent their acts of anti-Western remonstration. They’ll expect even more urgent and passionate apologies, and they’ll get them. And so it continues in a seemingly endless cycle: as we become ever more contrite in response to their remarkably exquisite “sensitivity,” the more and more “sensitive” they’ll become, and the more deeply we’ll bow and scrape, and so on.

It is a preposterous, demeaning, and uncivilized spectacle, and it makes a mockery of the whole business of giving offense (whether intentionally or unintentionally, by word or by deed) and expressing earnest contrition, and of taking genuine offense and sincerely accepting an apology.  These are real and meaningful and important ethical concepts.  They have to do with the acknowledgment of moral lapses and the restoration of decent and proper relations between responsible people living in free communities.  They play a fundamental role in the healthy give and take of civilized society – which is to say, society founded not on threats, bullying, vendettas, and the despotism of religious fanatics but on a shared reverence for individual liberty and a fully reciprocal tolerance for differences that do not imperil that liberty.

But what we have been witnessing in recent days … has nothing whatsoever to do with civilized human relations.  In one incident after another, there has been an increasingly grotesque disproportion between the scale of apology and the scale of the action precipitating the apology.  It is an unsettling and unworthy development.  In allowing ourselves to be dragged down this path, we have left far behind us the realm of normal, rational human interaction and descended into the abyss of appeasement, into a situation that is not truly about offense and apology in any civilized sense but, rather, about the barbaric exploitation of those civilized concepts – an exploitation whose objective is nothing other than manipulation and, in turn, the steady accrual of power.

It is, simply put, a form of jihad.