It ain't what he don't know; it's all the things he knows that ain't so: history, economics, math

http://tinyurl.com/mgxr9w
Our Historically Challenged President By Victor Davis Hanson In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a "student of history." But despite Barack Obama's image as an Ivy-League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, both in areas of facts and interpretation.This first became apparent during the presidential campaign ....Victory Column speech in Berlin last summer was also ahistorical. He began, "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city.",,,the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany were Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice -- both African-Americans....seemed to suggest that the world had come to together to save Berlin during the Airlift. In fact, it was almost an entirely American and British effort ...In the recent Cairo speech, Obama's historical allusions were even more suspect. Almost every one of his references was either misleading or incomplete. He suggested that today's Middle East tension was fed by the legacy of European colonialism and the Cold War that had reduced nations to proxies....the great colonizers of the Middle East were the Ottoman Muslims, who for centuries ruled with an iron fist. The 20th-century movements of Baathism, Pan-Arabism and Nasserism -- largely homegrown totalitarian ideologies -- did far more damage over the last half-century to the Middle East than the legacy of European colonialism.
Obama also claimed that "Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment." ...it had little to do with the European rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin values. Europeans, Chinese and Hindus, not Muslims, invented most of the breakthroughs Obama credited to Islamic innovation.Much of the Renaissance, in fact, was more predicated on...flight of Greek-speaking Byzantine scholars from Constantinople to Western Europe to escape the aggression of Islamic Turks....sought to extend freedom to oppressed subjects of Muslim fundamentalist rule in eastern and southern Europe
Obama also insisted that "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition."...began in 1478; by then Cordoba had long been re-conquered by Spanish Christians...
In reference to Iraq, President Obama promised that "no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other." Is he unaware of how the United States imposed democracies after World War II?...Obama also stated: "For centuries, black people in America suffered...But it was not violence that won full and equal rights."...The only thing that ended slavery in the United States was the Civil War, which saw some 600,000 Americans -- the vast majority of them white -- lost in a violent struggle...Also, the massive urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly violent....Obama, in elegant fashion, may casually invoke the means of politically correct history for the higher ends of contemporary reconciliation. But it is a bad habit. Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past -- President Obama included.****Obama's speech also implied that Zionism arose from the Holocaust, ignoring 3500 years to history; that Palestinians "suffered" for sixty years, ignoring the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s and that "Nakba" originally referred to Palestinians (who thought of themselves as Syrian ) being cut off from Syria in the British Mandate after WWI. His lauding Muslims for winning Nobel Prizes is laughable: with 20% of the world's population they shared in only six, including two for "peace"(including the abominable Arafat ), two in literature and only two in hard sciences.He ignored (or doesn't know)that Palestinans' standard of living ROSE after 1967 when Israeli control replaced Jordan in the West Bank and Eqypt in Gaza.Obama's mantra, repeated often, should be that he aims for CREDULITY rather than deserving CREDIBILITY.*****