To “burn the sacred texts of someone else’s religion is contrary to what this country stands for,” lectured Pres. Barack Obama at last week’s press conference. “It’s contrary to what this country — this nation — was founded on.”

If you are worried about the principles of the Founding, you are right to be. The First Amendment is about thwarting an authoritarian government, not policing how we argue with each other. Where was this grave concern about what this country stands for when the State Department wrote new constitutions for Iraq and Afghanistan that establish Islam as the state religion and impose sharia — a creed that, in Muslim countries, stifles freedom of conscience and the freedom to exercise religions other than Islam?
There is a government that makes it official policy to “burn the sacred tests of someone else’s religion.” It is Saudi Arabia, which regularly torches Bibles and other non-Muslim religious texts. President Obama is not hectoring Saudi sheikhs; he is about to provide them with $60 billion worth of advanced military arms, the better to protect their sharia state.

Egypt is a repressive regime in good standing among the repressive regimes of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Last October, it jointly sponsored a resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council, an international sharia redoubt. It would require all countries to “take effective measures” that prohibit “any advocacy of . . . religious hatred” that could incite “hostility” — which is to say, it demands that countries enact and enforce laws that bar criticism of Islam. Who was the Mubarak regime’s co-sponsor? The Obama administration.
Somehow, on that one, our smooth-talking president seems to have lost his voice on the matter of “what this country stands for.”

jhay78;492074 wrote:On the issue of First Amendment rights and "first principles":

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/246447/how-obama-gets-our-first-principles-wrong-andrew-c-mccarthy?page=2

It talks about the hypocrisy of Obama lecturing us about how

All of these examples below go against what Obama is lecturing us about:



So burning books is way, way down on the list of things for Americans to be concerned about.

Footwedge;492213 wrote:Maybe you should take up your complaint with General Petraeus....who thinks the exact same way as Obama does.

“We’re concerned that the images from the burning of a Quran would be used in the same way that extremists used images from Abu Ghraib — that they would in a sense be indelible,” Petraeus told NBC’s Brian Williams. “They would be used by those who wish us ill, to incite violence and to enflame public opinion against us and against our mission here in Afghanistan, as well as our missions undoubtedly around the world.”
But Petraeus insisted that the demonstration would “add fuel to already smoldering flames that are out there.”

It is highly unusual for a uniformed officer to express a public opinion on any political matter, and Petraeus said he would not “get into a debate about First Amendment rights — I’ll leave that to others.”

But he said he was speaking out because “what I’m paid to do is to lead a coalition of nearly 150,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and to partner with thousands of civilians from all of the coalition countries.”

“I believe I have an obligation to provide an assessment of the likely effects [of] an action in the United States by a fellow American citizen on the safety of those that I’m privileged to lead and those with whom I’m privileged to work,” he said.