Jonah, I’m afraid this gets to my point about how unpersuasive our arguments appear to the people we are trying to reach.

You are not making an argument that there is anything peculiarly racist about al Qaeda; you’re talking about the cultural biases of Arabs. And while I agree that ideology isn’t everything, and that other cultural trends have to be accounted for, the relevant issue here is not whether the abstract proposition “al Qaeda is racist” is one you, Jonah, can objectively defend on cultural (or any other) grounds. The question is what Obama meant in making this claim. Obama was resting his case specifically on ideology. As he put it, al Qaeda sees Africa “as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains.”

More to the point, Obama would emphatically reject any suggestion that Arabs are racist, or that being top-heavy with upper class Arabs could tend al Qaeda toward racism. The president goes out of his way to be understood as a lover of Arab culture. Once his election ended the injunction against any mentions of his middle name, he even went back to his original (circa 2007) position of frequently invoking “Hussein” — with its distinctly Arab resonance — as an ecumenical credential. When he says al Qaeda is racist, he is not intimating anything about Arab culture; he is speaking strictly about al Qaeda ideology.

If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re also making the cosmetically appealing contention that, because we know al Qaeda is virulently antisemitic, it shouldn’t be so hard to imagine that al Qaeda could also be anti-black. But that’s not an argument Obama would make. Antisemitism is an aspect of al Qaeda ideology (and for that matter, Arab and Islamic culture) that Obama prefers not to dwell on because it is firmly rooted in Islamic scripture and is thus a point of strong agreement between al Qaeda and mainstream Muslim thought. Obama’s position is that al Qaeda’s ideology not only has nothing to do with Islam but is, in fact, anti-Islamic. (This position makes even less sense than his claim that al Qaeda harbors racial prejudice against Africans.)

At any rate, there is no similar scripturally- or ideologically-based animus against black people in Islam. Indeed, Obama’s black African father and grandfather were Muslims, and his black African step-brother is a convert to Muslim fundamentalism. Further, while he was a senator, the president strongly supported the presidential candidacy of Raila Odinga, a communist who cut a deal with Islamists to support the expansive imposition of sharia in Kenya. There is nothing in Obama’s personal experience to suggest that he would understand blacks as similarly situated to Jews in the eyes of Islamists.

Insofar as more general information may bear on this: at a time when Islamist ideology is the dynamic ideology in Islam, dominating the leadership of about 75 percent of American mosques, it is notable that fully a third of American Muslims are black, including a whopping 90 percent of new converts to Islam. Al Qaeda, meantime, has aggressively recruited blacks since its origins in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, and it has been thriving in black Africa since the early 1990s — the very time-frame when bin Laden found a soft place to land in Sudan because Saudi pressure had made things too perilous for him in Afghanistan.

In sum, a culturally based argument for anti-black racism on the part of al Qaeda is one Obama would never make, and no one knows that better than black Africans. On the other hand, an ideologically based argument for anti-black racism on the part of al Qaeda is patently meritless. Since the latter is the one Obama was positing, it just makes him look foolish. I agree wholeheartedly with your observations about the value in pointing out Islamist political incorrectness, and encouraging lefties like Obama to do the same. But I think it hurts the cause to make implausible claims that make us look like we either don’t know what we’re talking about or think so little of our target audience that we assume pandering will win them over.