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
If Obama is Muslim or has been one in the past he will never become pres. But he may blunt Mrs. Clinton.
And if this be true he is a hero.
He appears to be an apostate and as such is eligible for beheading
***What exactly from that background would make him a Muslim? ***
His brother is from the same background and he is Muslim.
I think Obama was the only child raised by his grandparents in Hawaii, and all the siblings he refers to are half or step. I believe Roy is his half brother, one of his father's other wives children. The article says Roy converted to Islam in 1992, as part of going back to his African roots. Obama only met his father once in his life.
Obama lived part of his life in Indonesia, with an Indonesian stepfather, and then in Hawaii with his grandparents, until going to college in LA.
My point, after all that, is that I don't think he and his and half brother came from the same background. But still, I don't know what makes someone a Muslim.
"Why is it that the libs always get to prtray themselves as geniuses and conservatives are automatically branded as dullards?"
Because the MSM is made up primarily of liberals who like to see themselves portrayed in this manner. Certainly the members of the press aren't going to portray themselves as dullards.
9/12/01 none would have believed that 6 years later a closet muslim would be this close to becoming President of the U.S.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Obama's mother had atheistic beliefs, but that does not make her "non-religious." "Non-religious" means somebody who simply doesn't go to any church and doesn't care about having a religious faith. That does not describe either of Obama's parents, or his step parents, or any of the other third world deadbeats his free love flower child mother brought home from the hookah bar.
Obama's mother Ann Dunham was MUCH WORSE than simply "non-religious" - she was an actively practicing secular humanist who belonged to the Unitarian church. Unitarians, and particularly the more radical ones, elevate liberalism to the status of a religious faith. They treat Jesus as a coequal "philosopher" among many faiths, and are particularly attracted to other religions that they consider "exotic." The more non-western and backwards and third worldish and multicultural a religion is, the more exotic becomes to them and the higher attention it gets. So they naturally gravitate toward a wierd and almost psychotic alliance between secular humanism and islam.
Dunham's profession of secular humanism was just as active, dedicated, and fervently devoted as the most wild eyed fire-and-brimstone tent revival preacher on the 3 AM infomercial circuit. And being secular humanism, it was also thoroughly liberal, thoroughly marxist, thoroughly infatuated with "multiculturalism," and thoroughly evil.
It is true - Barack Obama wasn't raised explicitly muslim. He was raised a secular humanist Unitarian by his hippie mother, and a central tenet of her "religion" was dabbling in other third world religions that she considered exotic and multicultural. That is what likely prompted Ann Dunham's recurring attractions to muslim deadbeats on student visas from the third world. It is also how Obama got exposed to Islam. It wasn't a passing exposure either - Obama's brother, who got the same upbringing, converted to Islam because of it.
The best way to think of Ann Dunham is to picture one of those hippie ladies who brought her little kids to the Jane Fonda rally last saturday. She was the type of mother who believed it wasn't her place to "impose" any traditional religion on her children except that her means of ensuring this didn't happen was to indoctrinate them with a non-traditional religious viewpoint based on the kookier branches of Unitarianism. She was the type of mother who would give an 8 year old a Bible, a book of Confuscius, a Buddhist canon, a Hindu hymnal, a Koran, a witchcraft spell book, rastafarian pot brownies, and a voodoo doll. Next she'd fill his head about how closed minded Christians are. Then she tells him all other religions are "co-equal," and directs him to pick the one he's most comfortable with.
Obomba, sounds like a hip name for a bomb maker.
If the MSM keeps makeing a big deal over this guy you can bet the Hildabeast has all kind of stuff dug up on him.
That was another Muslim --- the one from MI who won a seat in the U.S. House.
I never heard he was sworn in with the Koran. Do you have link to that?
oops...my mistake.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/605874/posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfZ_gXCHaMw
Just the words? She couldn't follow the melody, either.
Not that there aren't a lot of people who can't sing. But SHE has the means to take voice lessons to learn how to follow a melody.
But maybe her lack of musical ability is what endears her to the leftists. Who knows.
It's okay --- two too many holding elected Muslims regardless.
OH, I had read that his mother didn't go to church. I didn't know all that about Unitarians. But in any event, can you tell me how one becomes a Muslim without actively doing something on their own part. And how do you know his mother directed him to choose a religion?
And, was this brother Roy a full brother? I am of the impression that he is a half brother by Obama's Kenyan father, and was not raised with Obama, which makes me think he wouldn't have been exposed to Obama's mother's beliefs about religion.
And finally, I've never seen anything to substantiate Obama's mother's "recurring attractions to muslim deadbeats on student visas from third worlds". It sounds like his father had already renounced Islam when she met him, and it also sounds like Obama's father came from a well to do family. And I've read that his step father made a good living in Jakarta and they lived in an upper class part of the city. Did she get involved with other so-called Muslim men? Two in a lifetime doesn't seem to be a recurring attraction.
Is that why so many of them are on some type of government assistance including for mental illness?! If you don't believe me go over to DU where they discuss it.
Actually, Ellison is from Minnesota.
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