The Reasonably Prudent Law Student

This is fun, and naturally strikes close to home for me, as I’m a Muslim.

I read about this on the LegalLine blog, and just had to write up something as well.

Today, President Obama addressed the nation about the economy and laid out the Five Pillars of Economic Recovery.

Those pillars are (as taken from The Legal Line):

1. New rules for Wall Street. (Certainly a good thing, since the ‘old rules’ aren’t working for us anymore, and that’s putting it lightly.)
2. Education. (All citizens are urged to take a year of higher education or career training, so that we might get back to building things and seeing innovations in the science and engineering sectors, etc)
3. Harnessing renewal energy. (This will hopefully create new jobs and new industries.)
4. Changing the health care system. (Billions could be saved if certain changes were enacted.)
5. Savings in the federal budget. (So as not to saddle the future generations with excessive debt. You know, more excessive than the debt they’ll already be saddled with. Semantics.)

They’re good points. Good pillars, so to speak.

But frankly? They’re nowhere near as awesome as the REAL Five Pillars.

Those being the Five Pillars of Islam, of course. ;-)

1. The belief that there is no God but God.
2. Praying 5 times a day.
3. Giving alms to the poor (2.5% every single year)
4. Fasting during the Islamic month of Ramadan from sun up to sun down for 30 days.
5. Performing the pilgrimage to Makkah if you have the means.

Oh, no! The five pillars of economic recovery are a lot like the five pillars of Islam! As in, they’re called pillars and there are five of them! Oh, no, a caliphate being set up in DC is imminent!

:-P

Suffice it to say, I’m far more amused by this than, say, the gentlemen at FOX News would be.

I realize that the percentage of people legitimately upset and angered by this comparison is small. But the fact that it’s a legitimate fear among even a small number (including anyone at FOX) just astounds me.

This Islamophobia has plagued the world for centuries upon centuries. Shakespeare penned Othello because he was legitimately afraid of a caliphate being set up in London and wanted to remind everyone that the Christian Venetians were the good guys and the Muslim Moors were the bad guys that killed their chaste Christian wives because they were wrathful, lustful, and animalistic.

Obviously, it’s not going anywhere. I understand and accept that; I’ve done enough Self v. Other critical theory work to have no issue with the fact that we instinctively hate the Other, he who is different…even if we love the Other. Fine.

But to connect this Islamophobia (that equates extremists with the large body of the religion, I might add, though I don’t want to get into that) with economic policies is really reaching. Really? Really, random FOX-News-kindred-spirits? You don’t have anything else to worry about other than the fact that Obama’s proven he’s leagues ahead of you in terms of multicultural awareness and has drawn inspiration from the belief system of the world’s fastest growing religion?

Really?

Yes, because, clearly, the most important takeaway from that speech was that Obama’s a closet Muslim. Which is a terrible, horrible, abominable thing and spells out disaster for this country. It wasn’t, for example, the fact that there are five things we’re going to do to try to dig ourselves out of the economic mess created in part by the last failwhale administration.

I had the speech clip up before, but WordPress is having issues with it. I’ve tried searching for it on YT but could only find Ron Paul’s response to it. If you really want to see it, I hope you have better luck finding the clip. :)

Be careful, though: if you watch the clip and you pay too much attention to the five pillars, you could end up converting to Islam before the speech is over. And then the terrorists would have won.