Two versions of Obama’s Iftar Party, one by the White House?one by Press TV One would not imagine it was the same event. Please scroll down and read both versions before making your mind up. An account by an attendee
President Obama Hosts Iftar Dinner at the White House
President Barack Obama hosts an Iftar dinner celebrating Ramadan in the State Dining Room of the White House, July 14, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Amanda Lucidon)
Last night,?President Obama hosted his sixth Iftar dinner?celebrating Ramadan at the White House, an annual tradition started by First Lady Hillary Clinton when she hosted a Ramadan Eid celebration dinner in 1996. Many consider President Thomas Jefferson to be the first President to host an Iftar dinner, as he hosted a sunset dinner to accommodate the fasts of an envoy from Tunisia over 200 years ago.
The Iftar is the meal after sunset that concludes the day of fasting during the month of Ramadan, a time to pray and reflect, to be reminded that we are equals in humanity, and to reaffirm commitments to helping the less fortunate, including those struggling from economic hardship and inequality.
Last night, guests were welcomed into the East Wing where a copy of the Quran owned by President Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was on display from the Library of Congress. At sunset, guests gathered in the Grand Foyer to break their fast with a date following the traditional melodic Muslim call to prayer led by a local student from the University of Maryland. Then finally, after a 16-hour day of fasting since sunrise, guests gathered in the State Dining Room for a?halal?meal with the President.
President Thomas Jefferson?s copy of the Quran on display for guests attending the White House Iftar. (Photo by Jill DeWitt of the Curator?s Office)
Among attendees were members of the diplomatic corps, White House administration officials, U.S. Government staff, elected officials, and Muslim Americans who have been doing great work to strengthen the fabric and prosperity of our nation. This year?s Iftar celebrated Muslim Americans working tirelessly to fight income inequality by creating opportunities for access, whether through education, health, food security, or at-risk youth development.
Among those at the President?s table was Kelly Carlisle, a former member of the Navy who leads an urban farming program where at-risk children grow and sell fresh food to eat healthier and deposit the profits they earn into individual savings accounts to build toward a better future.
Aala Muhammed?s parents emigrated from Sudan and worked several jobs to send her to a good high school in Chicago, but her hopes of going to college faced financial challenges. With the help of a nonprofit that focuses on young people, she earned admissions to Yale University and now runs her own program to encourage girls of color to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
Also seated with the President was Muhammed Chaudhry, who runs a foundation that works with schools, parents, and local IT startups to better prepare students to embrace science and math and find creative ways to keep academic enrichment programs going for low-income students in the face of summer program budget cuts.
During his?remarks, the President thanked the Muslim community for the contributions they?ve made to create opportunities for those who lack access. No matter our faith, race or gender, we are equals in humanity.
Tonight we reaffirm a simple truth.? Fundamental to the character of our country is our freedom of religion — the right to practice our faith as we choose, to change our faith if we choose, or to practice no faith at all and to do all this free from fear of.? All of us are deserving of an equal opportunity to thrive — no matter who we are, what we look like, what we believe, or how we pray.? And all of us have an obligation to do our part — to help others overcome barriers, to reverse the injustice of inequality and to help more of our fellow citizens share in the promise of America.
In Islam, there is a hadith that says God helps the servant as long as the servant helps his brother.? In other words, we?re summoned to serve and lift up one another, and that?s the lesson of several of our guests here tonight.
President Obama also wished Muslim Americans and Muslims all around the world a blessed Ramadan.
Read the President?s Ramadan statement here.
Here is the Press TV version:
The invitation was a trap.
Obama ambushed the Muslim invitees by unleashing Israel?s viciously racist ambassador, Ron Dermer, as the first speaker at the event. Dermer has famously said that Arabs and Muslims have ?a cultural tendency towards belligerency? that is ?deeply imbedded in the culture of the Arab world and its foremost religion.? He even celebrated ?the refusal of commuters on a Minneapolis flight to fly until three Arab passengers were removed from the plane? merely because they were Arab.
Imagine a 1980s-era South African ambassador saying that blacks have ?a cultural tendency towards belligerency? and celebrating racist whites who refused to fly on the same plane as blacks. Such a demented bigot would have been put on the next plane back to South Africa ? even by the right-wing Reagan Administration.
But instead of expelling the racist psychopath Dermer, the reputedly liberal Obama invited him to the White House ? to be opening speaker at the President?s biggest annual event supposedly honoring Muslims! What?s worse, at the same time Dermer was speaking to the appalled captive audience of VIP Muslims at the White House, Israel was slaughtering children in Gaza. Mental images of the photos of children with their heads blasted off or their entrails hanging out would be enough to ruin the appetite even of someone who has been fasting all day. And those are the images that come to the mind of every even slightly aware Muslim on earth when faced with the likes of such Zionist war criminals as Ron Dermer.
When Netanyahu appointed Dermer ambassador to the US, even many Israelis were horrified. They correctly saw that the appointment signaled that Netanyahu had closed the door to even the slightest chance at peace.
Israel?s leading newspaper Haaretz reported on Dermer?s appointment under the headline: ?Israel?s next U.S. envoy: Right-wing neo-con with close ties to Bush family.? According to Haaretz, ?Dermer?s positions on policy are far more extreme than Netanyahu?s. European and American officials have expressed shock by his positions on the settlement issue, on peace talks with the Palestinians, and on the principle of an independent Palestinian state.?
So when the Muslim guests at the White House Ramadan iftar saw who Obama had invited as keynote speaker, they must have felt like vomiting up their first meal in 24 hours.
Then it got worse.
Obama followed Dermer by standing before the nauseated guests and doing his best to justify Israel?s ongoing genocidal slaughter of the children, women, and men of Gaza. Israel, according to Obama, has ?the right to defend itself.?
By uttering that genocidal lie, Obama condemned himself as a war criminal. The truth is that Israel is not defending itself. It is committing aggression, and has been trying to eliminate Palestine and the Palestinians for more than six decades. Ever since the Zionists invaded Palestine, they have been the aggressors, and their aggression has been in service to genocide. It is the Palestinians who have the right to defend themselves against genocide.
Lying about the most basic fact about the occupation of Palestine ? that the Zionists are the aggressors, and the Palestinians are defending themselves, their homes, their land, their children, and their honor ? is a war crime. That crime is called ?propaganda for genocide.? It is the crime of Dr. Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist who, like Obama, tried to justify an ethnic cleansing by lying about who was doing what to whom and why.
Though I am one of America?s better-known Muslims, I did not receive an invitation to the White House iftar… which is probably just as well. Had I been present, I would have attempted a citizen?s arrest of both Dermer and Obama for complicity in genocide. Being wrestled to the ground by the Secret Service, and locked up for who-knows-how-long, would have put a damper on my career as TruthJihad.com?s White House correspondent.
Seriously, the President?s decision to invite the lunatic racist war criminal Dermer to speak at the? White House iftar was a colossal, monumental blunder. Such ham-handed, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot politics is uncharacteristic of Obama. In the past, the US President has made several gestures aimed at trying to normalize US-Muslim relations, which were nearly destroyed by the Zionist false flag operation of September 11th, 2001. (Polls show that roughly 80% of the world?s Muslims know that the official narrative of 9/11 is a big lie, yet despite the work of groups like Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, most non-Muslim Americans still give at least some credence to the ludicrous and now-fully-falsified official story.)
But since Monday?s botched, genocidal Ramadan iftar, Obama has forfeited what little good will he previously earned by pretending to strike a different pose from that of Zionist-driven 9/11 criminals Bush and Cheney.? After this, Muslims all over the world are going to see not just Obama, but America, as a 100%-Zionist-controlled existential enemy.
What can Obama have been thinking? After all, the President is known to loathe Netanyahu and Dermer. (Dermer was Netanyahu?s man in Washington, DC who with the help of Zionist gangsters like Sheldon Adelson, and an army of black-box-voting-machine hackers, tried unsuccessfully to throw the 2012 election to Mitt Romney.)
Maybe Obama was hoping that one of the Muslim guests would throw a shoe at Dermer… or worse.
I would have been more than happy to do so.
So Obama, if you want to see some fireworks at the White House, invite me… and put the genocidal criminal and 9/11 suspect Ron Dermer in the same room.
KB/HSN
