Enough With All Of This "Obama Is A Mooslim" Crap

I am usually quite proud of being a conservative. I know in my heart that the only way to enjoying liberty under the law AND equality of justice is through the application of conservative principles to government and society. And I am usually proud of the rational, reasonable basis on which most conservatives see the world and evaluate people and events.

That’s why it embarrasses me to no end to see fellow conservatives who actually believe that Barack Obama is some kind of “Manchurian Candidate” sent by Muslims to undermine American society. Or that Obama is a closet Muslim just waiting to take power before unmasking himself. Or perhaps most bizarrely, since Obama was born to a Muslim father, he is a Muslim whether he wants to be or not and that Muslims elsewhere will not let him forget his heritage.

There are other permutations to this theme involving Obama’s middle name of Hussein which to some of my fellow conservatives is a dead giveaway that he is Muslim. And there are no end of theories, rumors, tall tales, and outright lies about Obama’s Muslim childhood spent at this madras or that mosque which “proves” him to be a son of Islam.

Most of this idiocy takes place in comment sections of blogs and conservative boards where new Vince Foster murder theories still generate excitement. Occasionally, one of these stories goes mainstream and for a brief period, conservative are made to look like paranoid loons who believe Barack Obama is a cross between the anti-Christ and Osama bin Laden’s long lost brother.

Well, today conservative stupidity regarding Obama and his supposed ties to Islam hit paydirt – as in generating a ten on the laugh-o-meter. Evidently, the probable next president of the United States was caught in flagrante dilecto, dressed to the nines in what appears to be some kind of native garb (probably Kenyan) and with a (gasp!) turban on his head. To some of my unschooled, ignorant conservative friends, this is further proof that if we elect Obama president, there will be a department of Sharia Affairs.

The truth as Jim Hoft (via Sweetness and Light) shows, is a little less dramatic. The costume is that of a Kenyan tribal elder.

Now Obama already has some problematic connections to Kenya including his appearances for presidential candidate Raila Odinga, a distant cousin and someone whose recent actions in fomenting violence in Kenya following a crooked presidential election are extremely troublesome. (There have also been rumors of a deal between Odinga and the small Islamist party in Kenya that he would, if elected, establish Sharia law – a dubious proposition and almost certainly a lie that has been picked up by some conservatives in this country and passed off as the truth.)

But the idea that Obama in traditional Kenyan garb proves he’s some kind of closet Muslim or Islamic sympathizer is absurd. Kenya is 70% Christian and only 10% Muslim. To extrapolate that Obama’s dress denotes anything other than acknowledging his birthright not to mention playing the gracious guest by donning the clothing of his hosts is irrational, stupid, ignorant, and totally without foundation.

But that doesn’t stop some from allowing imagination to trump rational thought:

While writing this post, I received a comment on my articlefrom yesterday about Obama’s radical friends. The wildly off base nature of most of the charges made almost make me believe I’m living on a planet full of escapees from the loony bin:

I receive these kinds of comments all the time and read them constantly on other blogs. What the commenter and other conservatives don’t take into account about Obama is that he is much more of a calculating man than anyone generally gives him credit for. He attends a church in Chicago whose pastor is admiring of black racist Louis Farrakahn. But I doubt whether Obama’s Christianity goes much deeper than his devotion to Islam – which is to say his religiosity is a calculated element of his political personae. His attendance at Trinity United Church Of Christ in Chicago establishes his authenticity as an African American more than fulfilling any spiritual need the candidate may have.

And that’s why I find charges that Obama is some kind of closet Muslim so absurd. The candidate may have been trained as a grass roots organizer using the playbook written by radical Saul Alinsky. And he may have been involved in radical leftist politics early in his career. But a man who has so carefully crafted a political resume by conveniently being absent for key votes or voting “Present” on controversial bills – all the better to obscure how far left his politics go or what his true politics are – it is not beyond imagining that whatever his religious beliefs, they are calculated to effortlessly merge with the rest of this image Obama is presenting to the world. There is no room for Islam in this image nor is there anything in the public record that would indicate Obama has even given his Muslim heritage – if indeed his father was a member of the Islamic faith – a second thought as an adult.

I would say to my conservative friends who continue to insist that this is a rich vein to mine that you are so off base as to be a laughingstock. Just because my middle name is David doesn’t mean I’m a Jew despite a long, illustrious connection of that name to the history and faith of the Hebrews. Hence, this nonsense about Obama’s middle name being “proof” that he is a Muslim has got to stop. There’s no evidence that name was given to him for any other reason except the given one – it was his father’s middle name as well.

Nor does Obama dressing up in local garb make him a Kenyan elder or a shadow Muslim. The fact that he is wearing a traditional headdress is irrelevant to what he believes. When Calvin Coolidge was photographed wearing a Lakotan headdress, no one came out and said Coolidge was a devotee of The Great Spirit. Politicians wear all sorts of funny hats and clothes. It’s part of Americana. For Obama to be singled out for honoring his hosts by dressing in traditional garb is the height of stupidity and my conservative brethren should be ashamed of themselves.

I really wish this meme would stop. There is so much else to criticize Obama for that to start tilting at windmills by claiming he’s a danger to our Judeo-Christian society is a waste of time, effort, and resources. I would imagine the candidate himself rather than being hurt by these accusations probably gets a good laugh out of them, so silly they are and so revealing of the stupidity that permeates a large subset of the right.

Snopes.com seeks to disprove the “allegations” that Obama is a Muslim, but in the process, they provide some interesting information that people should read — read the fine print, as they say.

[Note that snopes.com, while it is viewed as an authentic site to prove or disprove “urban legends”, are very liberal. (They claim that the allegation against Hillary not receiving the Gold Star Mothers is not true, but when you read their own details, it shows that it is true) — this is just another example of having to read the fine print, not just their “true/false” assessment]

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp

“Barack Hussein Obama (Senator Obama’s father) was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in
Alego, Kenya. He met and married an American woman, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas,
while they were both attending the University of Hawaii. Their son, also named Barack
Hussein Obama was born on 4 August 1961 at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu,
Hawaii.

Although the elder Obama was raised as a Muslim, no evidence supports the claim that he
was ever a “radical Muslim,” and Senator Obama’s family histories note that his father was
an atheist or agnostic (i.e., no longer a practicing Muslim) by the time he married the
younger Obama’s mother.

Of his mother’s religious views, Senator 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.
This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a
working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any wellrounded
education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat
on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or
Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the
Buddhist temple, the chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient
Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings
required no sustained commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of human
culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways â€” and not
necessarily the best way â€” that man attempted to control the unknowable and
understand the deeper truths about our lives.
In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would
become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a
suitable detachment as well.

Barack Obama’s parents divorced when he was two years old, his father moving to
Connecticut to continue his education before returning to Kenya.

When the younger Obama
was six years old, his mother married again, this time to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil
manager. Barack and his mother moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Obama spent 4-5 years
attending both Muslim and Catholic schools before his mother sent him back to the United
States to live with his maternal grandmother. The school Barack Obama attended in
Indonesia was “Muslim” primarily in the sense that the preponderance of its student body
was Muslim (because Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country), but both the Muslim and
Catholic schools he attended in Indonesia offered a few hours of religious instruction each
week.

....

The beginnings of Obama’s relationship with the church were
described in an April 2004 Chicago Sun-Times article:

Obama is unapologetic in saying he has a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” As
a sign of that relationship, he says, he walked down the aisle of Chicago’s Trinity
United Church of Christ in response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s altar call one
Sunday morning about 16 years ago.”

NOTE: He spent “4-5 years” in Indonesia, after moving there when he was 6-7. So apparently he returned to the US when he was around 12 — having been exposed to Islam quite a bit, prior to that.

He claims he started a relationship with a church in 1985, but if you read more (right at snopes.com, at above link, you find that his interest was in activism, not church.

“So how did he become a churchgoer?
It began in 1985, when he came to Chicago as a $13,000-a-year community organizer,
working with a number of African-American churches in the Roseland, West Pullman and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods that were trying to deal with the devastation
caused by shuttered steel plants.
“I started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on
issues like creating job-training programs, or after-school programs for youth, or
making sure that city services were fairly allocated to underserved communities,” he
says. “And it was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual
view of religion deepened.
“I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church
and its importance in the community. And the power of that culture to give people
strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people
courage against great odds. And it moved me deeply.”

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