In seeking a “new way forward” with the Muslim world, President Barack Obama now views his Muslim heritage as a diplomatic advantage, rather than a liability. Before being elected as president in November, as Jake Tapper notes here, the Obama campaign had been quick to downplay and obscure his Muslim roots. During one campaign stop in September, for example, Obama rebuked critics who were trying to “scare” people by saying he had “Muslim connections.”

Yesterday, however, he punctuated his appeal for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims by highlighting his own Muslim roots. During his speech at Cairo University, after quoting a verse from the Koran, Obama said he firmly believed the interests shared between Americans and Muslims are much stronger than those forces driving us apart. Part of that conviction, he said, is “rooted in my own experience” (emphasis mine throughout):

I’m a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith. … So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.

In an April speech before the Turkish parliament in Ankara, after being introduced by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama—something that wouldn’t have happened during a campaign rally last year—the president said, “The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country—I know, because I am one of them.”

Earlier this week, the president grossly overestimated this supposed Islamic enrichment of American civilization. “If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans,” he said in an interview in the lead-up to his speech in Egypt, “we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”

In fact, as Toby Harnden points out at the Daily Telegraph, the U.S. would rank somewhere between 34th and 48th on the list. The Muslim population in America is estimated to be somewhere between 1.8 and 6 million, which is much less than 1 percent of the total number of Muslims worldwide.

Besides overstating Islam’s influence on America, the president also exaggerated Islam’s impact on Western civilization. At Cairo, among other things, he credited Islam for “paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” for developing print technology and our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed, and for demonstrating religious tolerance throughout history.

But Obama’s biggest blunder, as Amir Taheri wrote at the Times, was in being the first Western leader since Napoleon to address Islam as a single bloc, “thus adopting the traditional Islamic narrative of dividing the world according to religious beliefs.” Taheri wrote,

This ignores the rich and conflict-ridden diversity of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and fosters the illusion, peddled by people such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Islam is one and indivisible and should, one day, unite under a caliphate.

To speak to the “Muslim world,” an editorial column at Asia Times Online pointed out on Tuesday,

is to speak not to a fact, but rather to an aspiration, and that is the aspiration that Islam shall be a global state religion as its founders intended. To address this aspiration is to breathe life into it. For an American president to validate such an aspiration is madness. …By addressing the “Islamic world” from Cairo, Obama lends credibility to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other advocates of political Islam who demand that Muslims be addressed globally and on religious terms—in contradistinction to nationalists such as Mubarak. Rather than buttress a loyal ally, Obama’s speech undermines him on his home ground.

Indeed, included among the guests Washington invited to Obama’s Cairo speech were members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The Egyptian daily Al-Masri al-Youm reported June 4 that Obama met with Brotherhood officials in Washington two months ago, according to Haaretz. The report said the MB members requested the meeting not be publicized and that they talked to Obama about their support for democracy and the war on terror. In actual fact, the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamist group with terrorist roots and the primary—though disallowed—political opposition to President Mubarak.

Certainly, Washington’s overtures toward the Muslim Brotherhood will not help Egypt’s president. This, as many of our regular readers are probably thinking, brings to mind a Bible prophecy that indicates a soon-coming radical shift in Egyptian politics. That shift will occur because of a prophesied end-time alliance between Egypt and Iran, the head of the radical Islamist snake—called the “king of the south” in Scripture.

Speaking of Iran, the mullahs had to be delighted with President Obama’s declaration yesterday that Iran should have the right to develop nuclear power—so long as it’s peaceful. Meanwhile, the president remains naively committed to seeking a “world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons.”

All systems go for the Iranian nuclear project.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, also have good reason to celebrate Obama’s historic Muslim address. As we have pointed out often before, the prophesied clash between the European “king of the north” and the Iran-led “king of the south” will primarily revolve around Jerusalem. With President Obama telling the Islamic world that America “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” and that it’s “time for these settlements to stop,” it’s no wonder Mahmoud Abbas, who turned down a generous Israeli offer for Palestinian statehood last year, is in no rush to meet with Israel’s new government. He’s quite content to sit back and watch Obama and Netanyahu duke it out.

This too is prophetic, as we have been saying for years. President Obama’s dramatic policy shift toward Israel is rapidly leading to the inevitable division of the U.S.-Israeli alliance. That split will result in Israel’s desperate turn to Germany, of all nations, for help in stemming the rising tide of Islamic extremism. (That plan will backfire.)

To sum up, then, President Obama’s overtures in Cairo, as sincere as they might be, will not result in better U.S.-Islamic relations, nor bring the people of the world together in peace, as he intoned at the end of his speech yesterday.

Instead, for all of his trouble, as Asia Times Online opined, the president will get “more megalomania from Iran, more triumphalism from the Palestinians, and less control over Iraq and Afghanistan. … It is hard to imagine any consequence except a steep diminution of American influence.”