In the days since President Obama's highly touted "speech to the Muslim world," a number of commentators have pointed out that Obama, a self-described "student of history," managed to serve up a pastiche of half-truths, exaggerations, and utter nonsense about Islamic history, and that even in his supposedly gutsier moments -- as when he criticized the treatment of women in Muslim societies -- he was hardly as forceful as the circumstances warrant.

It's no coincidence that the commentators who have made these points have done so, almost without exception, not in major media organs but in places like Pajamas Media. For the flattering account of Islam that Obama served up in Cairo -- the celebration of imaginary Islamic achievements in science and culture, the evocation of a golden-age Andalusia where Christians and Jews were treated with respect and equality, and the references to the Koran that made it sound like the Sermon on the Mount -- are of a piece with the fictions about Islam found regularly in the mainstream press. This is certainly true of the New York Times, and it's equally the case with the Washington Post -- a fact that will be obvious to any reader of my new book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, in which the index includes the following entry:

Washington Post, 66, 102, 103, 149-51, 156, 163-64, 238, 262, 263-64, 276

Now, with the single exception of the very last Post reference (the one on page 276, which is a thumbs-up for columnist Anne Applebaum), my mentions of the Post in Surrender all point to the reliability with which the newspaper clings to what one might call a wishful-thinking view of Islam -- as if Islam were, say, nothing more than Episcopalianism with prayer rugs and burkas...