Posted on 01/29/2007 2:36:31 PM PST by EternalVigilance
WASHINGTON - Although Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, his childhood and family connections to Islam are beginning to complicate his presidential ambitions.
The Illinois Democrat spent much of last week refuting unfounded reports that he had been educated in a madrassa, or radical Islamic school, when he lived in Indonesia as a boy.
“The Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa,” said a statement put out by the senator’s staff.
But the school did teach the Quran, Islam’s holy book, along with subjects such as math and science, according to Obama, who attended when he was 9 and 10.
“In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school,” he wrote in his first memoir, “Dreams from my Father.” “The teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.”
Obama — whose father, stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims — explained his own first name, Barack, in “Dreams”: “It means ‘Blessed.’ In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim.”
In his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama added: “Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist.”
Still, when his father, a black Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, “the family wanted a Muslim burial,” Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as saying in “Dreams.”
The statement put out by Obama’s office last week referred to his father simply as “an atheist,” without mentioning his Muslim upbringing.
But with pundits already making faith a major issue in this presidential campaign — as evidenced by questions about Republican Mitt Romney’s Mormonism — Obama’s religious background is likely to come under further scrutiny.
“He comes from a father who was a Muslim,” said civil rights author Juan Williams of National Public Radio. “I mean, I think that given we’re at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem.”
Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, for whom the senator was given his middle name, Hussein, was fiercely devoted to Islam, according to an account in “Dreams.” The grandfather, who died in 1979, was described by his widow when Obama visited Kenya in the late 1980s.
“What your grandfather respected was strength. Discipline,” Obama quoted his grandmother as telling him. “This is also why he rejected the Christian religion, I think.
“For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man’s sins.
“To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort women,” she added. “And so he converted to Islam — he thought its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs.”
When Obama was 2 years old, his parents divorced and his father moved away from the family’s home in Hawaii. Four years later, his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, who moved his new wife and stepson to Jakarta.
“During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school,” Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf.”
Obama’s stepfather was a practicing Muslim.
“Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths,” Obama recalled. “He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”
“It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction,” Obama recalled. “He introduced me as his son.”
Although Obama wrote of “puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer,” he was not raised as a Muslim, according to the senator’s office. Nor was he raised as a Christian by his mother, a white American named Ann Dunham who was deeply skeptical of religion.
“Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones,” Obama wrote. “For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.”
As a result, he said, “I was not raised in a religious household.”
Later in life, however, he was drawn to the writings of an influential American Muslim who served as the spokesman for the militant Nation of Islam.
“Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different,” Obama wrote. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”
He added: “Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation.”
While working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, Obama was repeatedly asked to join Christian congregations, but begged off.
“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote.
But after much soul searching, he eventually was baptized at Trinity United Church of Christ.
“It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear,” he explained. “But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”
Obama’s family connections to Islam would endure, however. For example, his brother Roy opted for Islam over Christianity, as Obama recounted when describing his 1992 wedding.
“The person who made me proudest of all,” Obama wrote, “was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol.”
Meanwhile, Obama remained sharply critical of what he called “the religious absolutism of the Christian right.”
In “Audacity,” the senator wrote that such believers insist “not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.”
As for the Democratic Party, Obama observed that “a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears — rightly, no doubt — that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices.”
Although the overwhelming majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, Obama does not believe that any one religion should define the United States.
“We are no longer just a Christian nation,” he argues in “Audacity,” which was published last year. “We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”
Obama calls the Iraq war “a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country.” He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S.
“In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans … have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging,” he laments. “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
Sen. Barack Hussein Obama
» Born: Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham.
» Education: Graduated from Columbia University in 1983; graduated in 1991 from Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
» Family: He and wife, Michelle, were married in 1992. They have two daughters: Malia, 8, and Sasha, 4.
» Residence: Chicago’s South Side
» Political career: Served seven years in the Illinois state Senate; sworn in as U.S. senator in January 2005. Serves on the Environment and Public Works Committee, the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee.
Source: www.barackobama.com
bsammon@dcexaminer.com
Attacking Obama over something he had no control over (his childhood) will do just the opposite of what the attackers want. It is a sure loser and will only help him.
Ann Dunham was a classic case of a Unitarian free love flower child of the worst type. Dunham was the offspring of liberal Unitarian beatniks who filled her head self-hatred for western civilization and a fascination with third world multiculturalism, particularly islam. She spent her college years as a free love hippie, stumbling through two unstable marriages with muslim deadbeats on student visas and popping out babies who she was unprepared to support.
Barack Obama literally spent the formative years of his life - his childhood, his gradeschool, and his first introductions to religion - while in tow of his hippie mother as she frolicked around the south pacific with a bunch of other free love bohemians licking frogs and smoking "herbal remedy" flowers in the name of world peace.
To an extent, I actually pity the guy. He can't help that his mother was a marxist kook. But the fact remains that she was, and her marxist politics rubbed off on her son.
A disposable platter to boot...
Imagine it is 1952. Could a man who was raised in the hitler youth, but denounces it now, be elected president?
I don't think we really have anything to worry about here.
If we do, I need to leave.
Yahh, the guy would be condemned to death in most islamic countries if he converted from Islam to Christianity.
Maybe the MSM knows he'll be rejected by the islamic community as well. The islamic community will go with whatever democrat most weakens the US. That would be Hitlery.
>>He's having to admit how much of his past he's been covering up.<<
And like Kerry, he will have no choice. He WILL be "Swiftboated".
The article does not say he chose Jesus Christ. It says that after much soul searching he was baptized. To a liberal, soul searching could merely be equivalent to putting a finger up to see which way the political wind was blowing.
It also says he was enamored of Malcolm X. Never does it say that he was a follower of Jesus Christ. The only reference to Christian doctrines in the article are the negative assessments by his grandfather.
Perhaps this article does not properly convey Obama's spiritual beliefs.
You're right that Obama had no control over it. But the fact also remains that it made Obama into the marxist kook that he is today.
If you saw any news reports last weekend you probably saw videos of the Jane Fonda peacenik rally. There were hundreds of unfit hippie parents there with little children in tow - children wearing t-shirts that said "Impeach Bush" and children holding signs supporting Iran, the Intifada, Iraqi insurgents, communism, and all sorts of other horrible violent causes.
Those children had little choice in being there. Their deadbeat parents dragged them along and used them as a political ploy. But think of what rallies like that do to a child's development. Kids should be playing baseball with their friends on the weekend, not carrying signs espousing socialism. And like it or not, 99% of those kids are going to be screwed up nutcases just like their parents by the time they get to college.
I point this out because Barack Obama was one of those kids. He had a mother who was just like any given deadbeat with her kids in tow at the Jane Fonda rally. Although he couldn't help that, it undeniably shaped his marxist politics and today he's running for President on those politics.
If someone has evidence that Obama was raised a Muslim, why don't they produce it? Otherwise, speculation is just pointless.
Some people have short memories. Write a memoir every 5 years and they'll be OK.
If the Dems pick Barak Hussein Obama, and there's a significant terrorist attack on US soil between that point and the election, the Dem ticket is doomed. Middle America will NOT tolerate a maybe-Muslim
Do you think that most politicians do any work?
I've never seen anything that said he was a Muslim. What makes someone a Muslim? It sounds like he was raised in a non-religious household, both parents were atheists, and his step father was a Muslim. What exactly from that background would make him a Muslim?
And seriously, Muslims don't hunt down former Muslims all over the world to kill them. I work with former Muslims, and my son goes to school with tons of them. They just go about their lives, there is no threat to them.
"..who discarded Muhammad for Jesus?"
How do you know he did? Can this country afford a Muslim sleeper in the White House?
...And Hillary is loving it.
IMO you pretty much have the mother down pat.
Now I dont know how much Muslim education he had,but the fact that his brother, who we may assume got about the same amount went Muslim is telling.
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