While giving a speech, Senator Ted Cruz revealed an interesting excerpt from Barack Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that has gone overlooked to this point. That excerpt puts Obama nearly 100 percent in line with the goals of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries that seeks to criminalize any and all criticism of everything Islam. In fact, the short video excerpt from Obama’s speech below – when compared to a meeting that took place in Istanbul, Turkey a few years ago – clearly shows that the President is in league with such forces.

First, take a look at the quote from Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, in question:

“…if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults — (applause) — and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks. Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t question those who would insult others in the name of free speech….”

The video below will start and stop at the relevant times:

Let’s rewind back to July 15, 2011. It was the first meeting of what has become known as the “Istanbul Process”. It was co-chaired by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then Foreign Minister of Turkey (now Prime Minister) Ahmet Davutoglu, and then Secretary-General of the OIC Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu. The intent of the meeting was to find a way to thread the needle between the recently passed United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which called for the suppression of anti-religious speech and the first amendment rights in the U.S.

July 15, 2011: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, and Turkey Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu (L to R).

The Turks and the larger OIC wanted then – as they do today – to make criticism of Islam a crime. Clinton, knowing that this couldn’t fly in the west without some good, old-fashioned incremental progressivism, advocated that the job be outsourced to non-government entities. Here is an excerpt from Hillary’s remarks that day. See if they resemble Obama’s remarks at the prayer breakfast:

“…we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

Secretary-General Ihsanoglu put a bit more force behind the sentiment. Hillary was clearly advocating for the enforcement of political correctness and Ihsanoglu was advocating for the criminalization of what he perceived to be political incorrectness. In this case, speech critical of Islam:

“We continue to be particularly disturbed by attitudes of certain individuals or groups exploiting the freedom of expression to incite hatred by demonizing purposefully the religions and their followers. Though we respect their freedom of opinion and expression, we find these attitudes politically and ethically incorrect and insensitive.”

When it comes to Davutoglu, he is joined at the hip ideologically with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In an embarrassing display, Davutoglu was one of the world leaders who joined in the now infamous Paris march in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The presence of Davutoglu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the march made it a circus. Soon after participating, it was Davutoglu who then called for a similar march against Islamophobia, as Shoebat.com reported.

Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu at Paris Rally, supports “Istanbul Process”

As Shoebat.com reported, one day prior to the 2011 meeting, on July 14th, a federal informant for the U.S. Government named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula began casting for Innocence of Muslims, a 14-minute video that the Obama administration would blame for the Benghazi attacks.

Then OIC Secretary General Ihsanoglu and HIllary at U.S.-Islamic World Forum in 2011.

In the days before those attacks, Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt began agitating the population. Making this easier was the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood – led by President Mohammed Mursi – was in charge of the country at the time. The agitators pointed to the video as unacceptable speech and rubbed raw the sores of Muslim discontent in Egypt, calling for protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. One of the two top culprits when it came to generating this discontent was a man named Nader Bakkar, spokesman for the Salafist Nour Party; the other was a man named Wisam Abdul Waris, as Shoebat.com reported. In the days before and after the attacks, Bakkar had an interesting travel schedule:

Bakkar was scheduled to be in the U.S. for a dialogue in New York and Boston regarding the Egyptian Constitution on September 9th, 2012, yet the event got postponed until September 15th – 16th in New York and New Jersey and on the 17th in Boston then travel to Texas.

The protests in Cairo took place on the afternoon of September 11th. Later that night, the U.S. Special Mission Compound (SMC) was attacked. In the days that followed, dozens of protests in response to the video took place outside U.S. Embassies and diplomatic outposts all over the world.

Running concurrent with all of this was an attempt by the Obama administration – for two weeks – used words like ‘disgusting’, ‘crude’ and ‘reprehensible’ to describe the video while adamantly insisting it had ‘nothing to do with’ it. In short, Obama, Hillary, et. al. used some…

“…old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what (they) abhor.”

For more on the increasingly suspicious circumstances surrounding the production of Innocence of Muslims, click here.

Something that should not be lost on anyone is that when Barack Obama was talking about the persecution of religious minorities, he wasn’t talking about the heinous persecution of Christians in Muslim lands; he was talking about the virtually non-existent persecution of Muslims in Christian lands. He ignores the elephant in the room, which is also very instructive.

While religious equality for all sounds great, that’s not how the world Obama operates in works. Making criticism of Islam criminal or socially unacceptable is not going to make the same toward Christianity be any more so. The pattern is that such criticism of Christians and Jews will continue to be ignored.