A wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly
Amy Davidson at the New Yorker tells us how Trump lectured the democratic heads of state at NATO on how awesome the Saudi king is.
He had just come from Saudi Arabia, Trump told the nato leaders, in a brief speech. “There, I spent much time with King Salman, a wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly.” That meeting had been “historic,” Trump said. The “leaders of the Middle East” had promised him that they would “stop funding the radical ideology that leads to this horrible terrorism all over the globe.” So that should take care of the problem. He did not define “radical ideology,” or acknowledge that he was praising a monarch in what seemed to be an attempt to put the assembled elected leaders of democracies to shame. Trump’s world view seems to combine a distaste for Islam with a predilection for monarchs of any background—for anyone with a decent palace, really.
Even an Islamist monarch, even an Islamist monarch of the family and regime and sect that has been assiduously funding “radical ideology” all over the planet, including the US.
European leaders were reportedly hoping for an affirmation of Article 5 in Trump’s remarks; they didn’t get it. In general, the approach of his hosts on this trip seems to have been to hope very much that he doesn’t actually break anything. Remarks have been kept short, flattery long—a reminder, as with the international and unmerited fêting of Ivanka, of how Trumpism lowers the level of dialogue all around. Trump does like it when people give gifts (though he may not have appreciated it when Pope Francis, at the Vatican, handed him a copy of his encyclical on climate change), and so he thanked the 9/11 Museum, in New York, which had donated the girders, and Merkel, as a representative of Germany, for donating the slabs. He spoke a few sentences about the memorials’ symbolic power. But, as he looked around at the new headquarters, he seemed, again, to be dwelling on a different definition of a value.
“And I never asked once what the new NATO headquarters cost,” he said, as if he should be thanked for that act of restraint. “I refuse to do that. But it is beautiful.”
Even though it doesn’t have the name TRUMP plastered all over it.
mortifying. I wish I lived on Mars. . .
Do you get the feeling that Trump is mansplaining everything to the whole world?
Saudi Arabia is not only where Islam began, but IslamISM as well.
Trump sadly missed a golden opportunity. He could have informed the Saudi religious authorities that with only about 109 amendments to its holy book, Islam could truly become what it claims to be: a ‘religion of peace’.
He could have challenged each of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims to start the great Islamic Reformation straight away, by each of them going through their copy of the Koran and striking out each of the 109 verses advocating violence and harm to others, as found at the link below, and using a .waterproof black felt-tip pen.
For a Muslim to refuse to do this because holy book is to admit that the violence advocated in the relevant passages is likewise sacred. There is no way out of it. These passages do not deal with what has happened in the past, but with what should happen now and in the future.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/violence.aspx
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