Obama’s Mosque Speech Received Cynically by Iran’s Conservatives
US President Barack Obama’s address to the Islamic Society of Baltimore in a mosque in Maryland, aimed to combat what many call Islamophobia in the United States, has prompted controversy both inside and outside the US. The reactions are as mixed in Iran as have been in the States. While many Iranian reformist, moderate and even state-run media have hailed the speech as an unprecedented denunciation of anti-Islam bias by a US president, conservative media are still finding a few faults in Obama’s rhetoric.
In what may be seen as an amateurish inversion of Obama’s remarks, Fars News Agency ironically underlined only those parts the US President criticized ‘what he called anti-Semitism’ during his speech in a Baltimore mosque. Obama actually was giving an account of religious discriminations that have suppressed several minorities throughout American history as he quickly went on to condemn any attacks violating freedom of religion, including Islam, in the country. “We have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths. And when any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up. And we have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion,” the White House quoted him as saying.
Tasnim News Agency had a more modest approach, calling the remarks a follow-up to a domestic American trend as tackling terrorism in the name of Islam has become central to electoral debates in the country. The news agency cited White House spokesman Josh Earnest’s remarks on Tuesday, in which he condemned heated rhetoric used by “some Republicans to try to marginalize law-abiding, patriotic Muslim Americans”.
“It's just offensive to a lot of Americans who recognize that those kinds of cynical political tactics run directly contrary to the values that we hold dear in this country,” Earnest told reporters prior to Obama’s first visit to a mosque in the United States. “And I think the president is looking forward to the opportunity to make that point.”
It was last December, during a White House meeting, when the mosque visit and a speech denouncing Islamophobia were first brought up. However, Tasnim says the fact that it has been postponed so far and put after Obama’s unprecedented visit to the Zionist regime’s embassy in Washington shows his administration’s intention to kill two birds with one stone; to keep pledges made to the American Muslim community and heat up propaganda against the Republican nominees.
According to Tasnim, George W. Bush also visited the Islamic Center of Washington 6 days after 9/11 while preparing for full-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Now it has become clear that the main wave of Islamophobia surged right after the incident, following widespread US propaganda to pave the way for its military presence in the region for global threats caused by Islamic groups, particularly Al-Qaeda and the Taliban,” Tasnim continued in its argument on the electoral nature of Obama’s move.
At the end of the article, Tasnim calls the United States one of the main countries to be blamed for radical Islamism because on the one hand, the barbaric, terrorist ideology of such radical groups are mainly based in countries with the strongest strategic ties with the United States, namely Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, it is the United States’ main ally in the region, the Zionist regime, which is the main supporter of most anti-Islam propaganda.