Was Obama a Muslim?

**Ironduke** · 12-30-2007, 05:43 AM

Found this article on the Daniel Pipes website. Barack Hussein Obama is a practicing Christian, and it is questioned whether at some time he was a practicing Muslim (which he denies), or perhaps more important, would he be considered by Muslims as an apostate from Islam regardless whether he practiced it or not.

Quote:

Was Barack Obama a Muslim?
by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 24, 2007

"If I were a Muslim I would let you know," Barack Obama has said, and I believe him. In fact, he is a practicing Christian, a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ. He is not now a Muslim.

But was he ever a Muslim or seen by others as a Muslim? More precisely, might Muslims consider him a murtadd (apostate), that is, a Muslim who converted to another religion and, therefore, someone whose blood may be shed?

The candidate for president of the United States has delivered two principal statements in reply. His campaign website carries a statement dated Nov. 12 with the headline, "Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," followed by: "Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian." Then, on Dec. 22, in the unlikely setting of the Smoky Row Coffee Shop in Oskaloosa, Iowa, as he munched on pumpkin pie and drank tea with four locals, Obama provided more detail took on this topic than before. When asked to explain his Muslim heritage, he replied:

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My father was from Kenya, and a lot of people in his village were Muslim. He didn't practice Islam. Truth is he wasn't very religious. He met my mother. My mother was a Christian from Kansas, and they married and then divorced. I was raised by my mother. So, I've always been a Christian. The only connection I've had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country. But I've never practiced Islam. … For a while, I lived in Indonesia because my mother was teaching there. And that's a Muslim country. And I went to school. But I didn't practice. But what I do think it does is it gives me insight into how these folks think, and part of how I think we can create a better relationship with the Middle East and that would help make us safer is if we can understand how they think about issues.

These statements raise two questions: What is Obama's true connection to Islam and what implications might this have for an Obama presidency?
Was Obama Ever a Muslim?

"I've always been a Christian," said Obama, focusing on his own personal lack of practice of Islam as a child to deny any connection to Islam. But Muslims do not see practice as key. For them, that he was born to a line of Muslim males makes him born a Muslim. Further, all children born with an Arabic name based on the H-S-N trilateral root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama's full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.

More: family and friends considered him as a child to be Muslim. In "Obama Debunks Claim About Islamic School," Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press wrote on January 24, 2007, that

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Obama's mother, divorced from Obama's father, married a man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to the country from 1967-71. At first, Obama attended the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, where documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his stepfather. The document required that each student choose one of five state-sanctioned religions when registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant.

Asked about this, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs responded by indicating to Pickler that

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he wasn't sure why the document had Obama listed as a Muslim. "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim."

Two months later, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times (available online in a Baltimore Sun reprint) reported that the Obama campaign had retreated from that absolute statement and instead issued a more nuanced one: "Obama has never been a practicing Muslim." The Times looked into the matter further and learned more about his Indonesian interlude:

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His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama's grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended. That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.

The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque. "We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque," Zulfin Adi said. "But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played." … Obama's younger sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the family attended the mosque only "for big communal events," not every Friday.

Recalling Obama's time in Indonesia, the Times account contains quotes that Obama "went to the mosque," and that he "was Muslim."

Summarized, available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father. At some point, he converted to Christianity. It appears false to state, as Obama does, "I've always been a Christian" and "I've never practiced Islam." The campaign appears to be either ignorant or fabricating when it states that "Obama never prayed in a mosque."

Implications of Obama's Conversion

Obama's conversion to another faith, in short, makes him a murtadd.

That said, the punishment for childhood apostasy is less severe than for the adult version. As Robert Spencer points out, "according to Islamic law an apostate male is not to be put to death if he has not reached puberty (cf. ‘Umdat al-Salik o8.2; Hidayah vol. II p. 246). Some, however, hold that he should be imprisoned until he is of age and then ‘invited' to accept Islam, but officially the death penalty for youthful apostates is ruled out."

On the positive side, were Obama prominently charged with apostasy, that would uniquely raise the issue of a Muslim's right to change religion, taking a topic on the perpetual back-burner and placing it front and center, perhaps to the great future benefit of those Muslims who seek to declare themselves atheists or to convert to another religion.

But would Muslims seeing Obama as a murtadd significantly affect an Obama presidency? The only precedent to judge by is that of Carlos Saúl Menem, the president of Argentina from 1989 to 1999. The son of two Muslim Syrian immigrants and husband of another Syrian-Argentine, Zulema Fátima Yoma, Menem converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife said publicly that Menem left Islam for political reasons—because Argentinean law until 1994 required the president of the country to be a member of the Church. From a Muslim point of view, Menem's conversion is worse than Obama's, having been done as an adult. Nonetheless, Menem was not threatened or otherwise made to pay a price for his change of religion, even during his trips to majority-Muslim countries, Syria in particular.

It is one thing to be president of Argentina in the 1990s, however, and another to be president of the United States in 2009. One must assume that some Islamists would renounce him as a murtadd and would try to execute him. Given the protective bubble surrounding an American president, though, this threat presumably would not make much difference to his carrying out his duties.

More significantly, how would more mainstream Muslims respond to him, would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy? That reaction is a real possibility, one that could undermine his initiatives toward the Muslim world.

Source: Was Barack Obama a Muslim? - article by Daniel Pipes

WhamBam · 12-30-2007, 06:31 AM

Pardon me if it is too obvious but is it effecting his prospects? Any drop in poll numbers?

Kansas Bear · 12-30-2007, 10:43 AM

Doesn't matter to me, if he is a Muslim or isn't a Muslim. I'd sooner vote for him than Hillary Clinton!!

**TopHatter** · 12-30-2007, 12:32 PM

Snopes has a good article on this

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Was Barack Obama A Muslim?

FibrillatorD · 12-30-2007, 12:39 PM

Just the latest in a growing heap of moot points in the campaign to conflate religion and electoral politics. Filler piled on top of filler.

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But Muslims do not see practice as key. For them, that he was born to a line of Muslim males makes him born a Muslim. Further, all children born with an Arabic name based on the H-S-N trilateral root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama's full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.

They'll have to understand that Obama has Hussein in his name and isn't Muslim. Simple.

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The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is

In an online chat yesterday, The Washington Post's Lois Romano defended her newspaper's neutral stenographic coverage of the factually false right-wing smear campaign against Barack Obama, a whispering campaign alleging that Obama "is a Muslim, 'a 'Muslim plant' in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran". Romano's defense:

We are getting many questions of our story on Obama today. I'll try to address this as best I can. These are always very difficult decisions -- how to address something that people are talking about, that has clearly become a factor in the race, without taking a position. Part of our job is to acknowledge that there is a discussion going on and to fact check and lay out the facts. The Internet has complicated this responsibility because there is so much garbage and falsehoods out there.

This discussion has reached a high pitch on the Internet and our editors decided it was in the readers interest to address it. I have heard people say that they won't support Sen. Obama because they read he doesn't put is hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. He has denied this -- so airing some of this and giving him a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight.

That is self-evidently absurd. "Setting the record straight" would mean having the reporter report the facts and identify the false statements as false. But the Post did the opposite; it simply passed on each side's "views" without comment -- the factually true side and the factually false side -- as though they merited equal weight.

But Romano defends this practice as "setting the record straight." Here again we see an explicit statement of the corrupt view that so many establishment journalists now have of their role: "we pass on factual falsehoods from one side, note that the other side denies them, and call it a day. Then we've done our job." Greg Sargent, who notes that the Post reporter who wrote the article (Perry Bacon) admitted afterwards, in a statement, that the accusations he passed on against Obama are false, explained the obvious:

[T]he problem here is that WaPo, and not just Obama, should have "denied the accuracy" of the Obama-is-a-Muslim nonsense. The Obama Muslim smear is based on lies, not "rumors." Bacon in his statement above calls the Obama Muslim smears "falsehoods." But they aren't identified as such in the piece. That's what everyone is yelling about.

This is without question one of the most significant problems in how our establishment media functions. They refuse to subject claims -- particularly claims from the GOP power structure and the right-wing noise machine which they fear -- to any critical scrutiny.

For various reasons, they simply will not investigate such claims and, when warranted, identify such claims as false. The most they are willing to do is simply write down each side's claims and treat them equally, even when one side is blatantly lying. GOP operatives know that this is how the press functions and thus know that they can easily get away with spewing lies, and can even recruit the media into helpfully spreading them (using the predominant "he-said/she-said" template). That's the same process that led us into Iraq, kept us there for so long, protected endless presidential lawbreaking and enabled all sorts of fact-free smears.

One can see most vividly just how corrupt this process is whenever there is a news report that exemplifies the proper function of journalism. An article in today's New York Times by Michael Cooper, regarding Rudy Giuliani's campaign claims about his own record, is an excellent such example of good, basic reporting. Headlined "Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again," the article reports:

In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views. . . . .

After identifying numerous standard Giuliani claims regarding his crime and spending accomplishments, Cooper wrote:

All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong . . . .An examination of many of his statements by The New York Times, other news organizations and independent groups have turned up a variety of misstatements, virtually all of which cast Mr. Giuliani or his arguments in a better light.

Cooper details multiple false Giuliani statements by comparing what the candidate claims about his record as Mayor to what the facts actually show, and then highlights the gaping disparities. Cooper (as he should) also notes isolated instances of factually dubious or inaccurate statistical claims from other candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but explains that "with Mr. Giuliani running so strongly on his record, statistics have taken on a central role in his campaign."

Had this story been reported in accordance with the prevailing establishment media norms -- the type practiced by Time and defended by Romano -- it would have simply been presented as a mindless recitation of what "each side claims", as in: "Some claim that Giuliani has exaggerated his record of accomplishments as Mayor, while Giuliani campaign aides insist that his statements are accurate." But Cooper took the next step -- the one that distinguishes the basic reporting function from the role of propagandists and stenographers: namely, he investigated the competing claims and identified which ones were factually true and which ones were factually false.

It isn't actually that complicated. When a government official or candidate makes a factually false statement, the role of the reporter is not merely to pass it on, nor is it simply to note that "some" dispute the false statement. The role of the reporter is to state the actual facts, which means stating clearly when someone lies or otherwise makes a false statement.

It's staggering that this most elementary principle of journalism is not merely violated by so many of our establishment journalists, but is explicitly rejected by them. That's the principal reason why our political discourse is so infected with outright falsehoods. The media has largely abdicated their primary responsibility of stating basic facts. One can see how damaging that really is in those all-too-rare instances, such as Cooper's article this morning, when a real reporter fulfills the core function of journalism.

UPDATE: Speaking of good reporting, The Politico's Ben Smith did some of his own with the substantial investigative work to uncover the suspicious accounting practices involved in Giuliani's trips to visit his then-mistress. I still don't quite understand what the scandalous aspect of the story is. All NYC Mayors have constant security protection -- including when they engage in their secret recreational activities -- and the accounting shenanigans seem designed to conceal his adultery, not any financial improprieties. Still, the matter is clearly of public interest and the reporting done to uncover it was impressive.

By contrast, clear, undeniable corruption is self-evident in yesterday's story of Giuliani's assigning police resources to chauffeur his mistress. Whether illegal or not, it is tantamount to stealing city resources. That is a completely separate issue from the murkier story uncovered by Smith and it's hard to imagine any plausible defense to it.

UPDATE II: Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles mocks his own newspaper's corrupt, stenographic coverage of the Obama smear campaign.

UPDATE III The Center for Citizen Media's Dan Gillmor weighs in again on the Time/Klein scandal, calling it "a debacle for the publication and company that employs him, because Time itself has compounded the problem, demonstrating contempt for its audience." Gillmor concludes that Time's being forced to respond at all "is a direct result of the growing ability of new media to be heard. There's little to celebrate in this debacle, but we can at least take some satisfaction from that."

Similarly, Robert Niles of USC Annenberg School's Online Journalism Review says that the Time/Klein scandal "illustrates why so many readers are looking for an alternative to the political coverage they find in mainstream news publications." He concludes:

Fairness and balance are appropriate goals for journalists. But being fair to sources and providing balance among them should not outweigh the need to be fair to the readers, and to the facts. And balance should not be reduced to giving various points of view equal time or space in a story. It ought to mean that truth gets treated like truth and lies get treated like lies.

If you're going to lose audience anyway, why not take a stand for something on the way down? Maybe that'll inspire some more readers to stick around, too. Or even to take a fresh look at their local paper again.

Both Gillmor and Niles' pieces on the Time debacle are worth reading, and also directly relate to the general "real reporting" issues highlighted by the Obama/WP and Giuliani/ NYT articles discussed here.

Khan_Han · 12-30-2007, 12:47 PM

So what if his muslim...Isn't the USA a secular country? So whats the big deal?

HistoricalDavid · 12-30-2007, 13:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TopHatter

Snopes has a good article on this

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Was Barack Obama A Muslim?

I was gonna post this when I saw the thread title.

That article is the end of the matter for me.

**Ironduke** · 12-30-2007, 15:05 PM

First, the Snopes article is not titled "Was Barack Obama A Muslim?", this is the title of the Pipes article, the name of the Snopes article is actually titled "Who is Barack Obama" or "The Enemy Within." It addresses the claim that he is a "radical, ideological Muslim." The Snopes article link as posted is very misleading as it's not the actual name of the Snopes article at all.

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Urban Legends Reference Pages: Was Barack Obama A Muslim?

should be:

Quote:

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Who Is Barack Obama?

Nothing that is debunked in the Snopes article was claimed to be true in the Pipes article in the first place. The Pipes article doesn't claim that Obama was a radical Muslim, or an ideological Muslim, or that his father was. In fact the Pipes article corroborates most of the Snopes article.

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In fact, he is a practicing Christian, a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ. He is not now a Muslim.

Quote:

But Muslims do not see practice as key. For them, that he was born to a line of Muslim males makes him born a Muslim. Further, all children born with an Arabic name based on the H-S-N trilateral root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama's full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.

Quote:

The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque. "We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque," Zulfin Adi said. "But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played." … Obama's younger sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the family attended the mosque only "for big communal events," not every Friday.

Quote:

Summarized, available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father.

What was suggested is that at one point he was a practicing Muslim as a child in school, and whether he'd be viewed as an apostate from Islam today, and what effects this could have.

Dwarven Pirate · 12-30-2007, 17:08 PM

The whole thing is complete crap. They find no one is buying that he is a muslim, hence equal to islamic terrorists, so they decide to find some way to suggest that his being a christian is so much worse. As if, to a muslim, having been once a muslim is worse than never having been. "...his blood can be shed." So, every other christian's blood can't? We know from the world trade centers this is false, and to even consider such a proposition in this context is ridiculous. This is simply a twist on the same smear, and still a childish attempt to equate him with Bin Laden. Barack Saddam Hussein Obama bin Laden, anyone?

May I summarise the article?

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Obama says he isnt an apostate. But might he be an apostate? My God, HE IS an apostate! He will surely have to pay...

What I find most egregious about this ass is his premise that America ought to take heed of the "feelings" of foreignors when we cast our votes for our president. ***Of course, only if the article is honest, which it is not.

Makes me disgusted to think any American would see it as other than tripe. I especially like this part:

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More significantly, how would more mainstream Muslims respond to him, would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy?

He pretty much states as a fact that every mainstream muslim WILL see Obama as an apostate. Did he even talk to one? I doubt it.

Bigfella · 12-30-2007, 17:30 PM

Even by the generally low & totally biased standards of 'Frontpagemag', this particular article is special.

This is essentially a smear dressed up as a serious inquiry. Does it matter a whit if a pre-pubescent briefly followed the religion of his father & stepfather? no. However, if you want to try to play on the fears of the ignorant, what better way to smear him than pretend it does.

It is the following scentence that reveals how utterly deviod of scholarly value this article is:

"More significantly, how would more mainstream Muslims respond to him, would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy? That reaction is a real possibility, one that could undermine his initiatives toward the Muslim world."

Excuse me? so, the entire point of this article is that Muslims might not respect Obama. How about an article on potential muslim attitudes to Hilary Clinton? What is Islam's take on Mormonism? Shouldn't we find out before the primaries are over? And what about Muslim attitudes to a former evangelical preacher who probably believes they are all going to hell?

Lastly, can anyone even imagine such an article being written about Lieberman or any other Jewish politician? The question is absurd, yet the point is at least as relevant as anything put forth in this article. In fact, I think we can all imagine the reaction if someone wrote an article suggesting that Jews shouldn't run for President or VP because it would upset muslims.

Daniel Pipes is supposed to be a respected scholar. This article tells me that assessment is WAY off the mark. He is doing a terrifylingly good impression of a gutter level political hitman with this POS.

Khan_Han · 12-30-2007, 21:01 PM

I am sick to death with individuals who equate the whole Muslim population with terrorist filth. In my family we have 2 Christians, 1 Jew and the rest muslims. We get along perfect! Their religion or my religion for that matter is no issue. We characterize people according to their deeds, not according their religious beliefs.

Yeh, there are terrorists who claim to be Muslims and yeh there are some that claim that their religion instructs them to do such sickening acts. Up until the last few years we characterized these people as suffering from religious mania. Now, mainstream society states that they are Muslims, without even identifying the group(s) involved.

Whatever occurs automatically is blamed on Muslims. Yet, people forget that there are also non-Muslim terrorist organizations operating in the world. Yet, because the majority of these attacks by non-muslim terrorists do not occur in Western countries they are almost never heard of. In fact, sometimes these organizations operate in cooperation with other Terror groups based on other religions.

For Example, there are also several "Christian" based, "Jewish" based, "Hindu" based and "Japanese" based (Aum Shinrikyo) recognized terror groups in the world which have conducted bombings, assassinations inter alia. Below is a non-exhaustive list of World Terrorist Organizations (The names of the religion, members of the terrorist organizations claim to belong to are in inverted comas, because I am of the opinion that no religion condones or incites terrorism):

“Christian” terrorist organizations
Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) (Basque Fatherland and Liberty)
First of October Antifascist Resistance Group (GRAPO)
Army of God - An American anti-abortion terrorist group
God's Army - A terrorist group in Myanmar
Nagaland Rebels (1947-present) Active in predominantly Christian state in Hindu majority India. Involved in several bombings in 2004. Claimed hundreds of lives.
National Liberation Front of Tripura (1989-present)
Phineas Priesthood An American based Christian Identity movement
National Democratic Front of Bodoland, active terrorist in the Indian state of Assam, involved in the murder of Bineshwar Brahma, prominent Hindu Bodo activist and bombings
ASALA- Christian Armenian based terrorist organization which has conducted several bombings and assassinations of diplomats in Europe and Middle-East.
Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB)

“Islamist” terrorist organizations
Abu Sayyaf (1991-present; Islamist separatists; the Philippines)
Based in the southern islands of Jolo, Basilan, and Mindanao.
Branched off of the Moro National Liberation Front.
Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (Yemen)
Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Late 1970s-present; Islamists; Egypt)
Seeks to establish Islamist state in Egypt. Usually targets secular establishments, government buildings, police, the military, minorities, tourists, and “morally offensive” buildings.
Armed Islamic Group (1992-present; Islamists; Algeria)
Seeks to establish Islamist state in Algeria. Began operations in 1992 after the Algerian government ignored election results that gave victory to Islamist political parties.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades
Ansar al-Islam (December 2001-present; Islamists; Iraq)
Al-Qaeda (1988-present; Islamists; Afghanistan, Pakistan, and worldwide)
Asbat al-Ansar (early 1990s-present; Lebanese Sunni Islamists; southern Lebanon)
Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement - al-Qaeda linked separatist group in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region aiming to establish an Islamic state. Banned by China, along with related groups East Turkestan Liberation Organization, World Uighur Youth Congress and East Turkistan Information Center
Egyptian Islamic Jihad - Egypt (active since the late 1970s)
Fatah al-Islam - Lebanon (al-Qaeda inspired group which briefly took over Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in 2007, before being defeated by the Lebanese Armed Forces)
Hamas - West Bank, Gaza Strip. Listed as a terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, the European Union, Israel, and the United States[2]
Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM) - Pakistan and Kashmir
Hezbollah - Lebanon; Listed as a terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States
Hizbul Mujahideen - Pakistan and Kashmir
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan - Uzbekistan
Jaish-e-Mohammed - Pakistan
Jaish Ansar al-Sunna - Iraq
Jemaah Islamiyah - Southeast Asia
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi - Pakistan
Lashkar-e-Toiba - Pakistan
Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group - Morocco and Spain
Moro Islamic Liberation Front - (Islamic separatists; the Philippines)
Palestinian Islamic Jihad - Israel, West Bank, Gaza Strip
People Against Gangsterism and Drugs - South Africa
RSM or Rajah Solaiman Movement - Philippines
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat - Algeria
Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan - Pakistan
Students Islamic Movement of India - India
Takfir wal-Hijra - Egypt/Sudan/Algeria
Turkish Hezbollah - Kurdish organization operating in Turkey
Turkish Islamic Jihad - Turkey

Jewish
Jewish Defense League
Kach
Kahane Chai (designated as terrorist by Israel, the EU, and USA)
Irgun (Irgun Zvai Leumi, National Military Organization, Etzel)

Sikh

Babbar Khalsa- killed in excess of 1000 people
International Sikh Youth Federation
Khalistan Zindabad Force

As one Turkish proverb puts it…Not all five fingers are the same...you cannot state or even imply that all Muslims are terrorists or that Islam is the problem! Such ignorance actually fuels more tension and hatred inter-civilisation. What must be targeted is the core of the problem(s). What must be researched is how individuals are recruited by these organizations. What leads them to do such inhumane acts?
Simply stating or asserting that all Muslims are a terrorist just does not fix the problem. Mainstream Muslims are the actual ones also suffering from these terror attacks. In fact, several hundreds of Muslims have died in the bombing of the Twin Towers and the Istanbul bombing alone. Hence, Muslims are also bombed and murdered by these idiots. It's about bloody time we as society wake up and target the actual culprits not shift the blame. Shifting the blame is very easy to do...

**Ironduke** · 12-30-2007, 21:37 PM

Why is talk of terrorism being brought into the thread? Nobody here ever alleged that Barack Obama was a militant Islamic fundamentalist, nor his father. Nobody here said he attended a Wahabbi madrassah. I wasn't even aware myself of these allegations until that Snopes article was posted. If I did see them I would have sifted them out paying no mind to them.

Talk of terrorism should be left out of this thread, if you want to discuss it, discuss it elsewhere.

The fact remains, religion is salient in American politics. Whether its Mitt Romney's Mormonism, Barack Obama's possible practice of Islam as a youngster, Giuliani's support of policies that goes against Catholic doctrine, or Mike Huckabee reminding people on TV that Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, religion matters to voters.

Quote:

Lastly, can anyone even imagine such an article being written about Lieberman or any other Jewish politician?

Yes, there were articles published concerning his religion, mainly questioning his orthodoxy, but also the possible effect on US-Arab relations if a Jewish vice-president were elected and how his support of the Iraq War would alienate Jewish Democrats. Every time he has been in the media spotlight, there have been a plethora of articles about him and his religion, ditto for the rest of them. I'm sorry if you were unaware of this fact.

Bigfella · 12-31-2007, 08:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ironduke

The fact remains, religion is salient in American politics. Whether its Mitt Romney's Mormonism, Barack Obama's possible practice of Islam as a youngster, Giuliani's support of policies that goes against Catholic doctrine, or Mike Huckabee reminding people on TV that Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, religion matters to voters.

Yes, there were articles published concerning his religion, mainly questioning his orthodoxy, but also the possible effect on US-Arab relations if a Jewish vice-president were elected and how his support of the Iraq War would alienate Jewish Democrats. Every time he has been in the media spotlight, there have been a plethora of articles about him and his religion, ditto for the rest of them. I'm sorry if you were unaware of this fact.

Matt,

I'm not trying to pretend that religion isn't an issue in American politics or that it isn't written about. You live in a society where overt religiosity is a feature of public life. I would expect no less.

My issue here was the way that this particular article dealt with the issue. This article wasn't about Obama's religion & how it might play out among various constituencies. It wasn't even about how his alleged childhood religion might play out in relation to a particulart issue (middle east peace negotiations, for example). It was a series of claims about his childhood & how it might be percieved by about 1 billion Muslims. That is it. It really isn't particularly subtle or nuanced.

Have there really been articles this crude about Lieberman? Were there really articles whose premise was no more than 'should we elect a jew as VP - because Muslims won't like it'? It sounds a lot more like the sort of thing I would have expected from the 1960 campaign, not the 2000 one.

Have there really been simliar articles about Rudy, Huckabee, Romney or Clinton? I don't mean discussions of their beliefs (which this article wasn't), but thinly disguised warnings that you shouldn't elect them because the muslim world won't deal with them them? How about something like 'Muslims won't deal with an adulterer' aimed at Giuliani? The Pipes article was pitched at about that level.

In fact, my analogy was not the best. A better one would be a similar article about someone who had jewish parents (or a jewish mother, at least) but had been a christian since adolescence. So you find a well known scholar to write a piece whose sole discernable point is that having someone born a jew as President will upset moderate muslims You see how absurd it begins to sound when you actually try to find a realworld comparison?

I stand by my original assertion. This is a gutter level political hit dressed up as commentary.

Khan_Han · 12-31-2007, 09:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ironduke

Why is talk of terrorism being brought into the thread? Nobody here ever alleged that Barack Obama was a militant Islamic fundamentalist, nor his father. Nobody here said he attended a Wahabbi madrassah. I wasn't even aware myself of these allegations until that Snopes article was posted. If I did see them I would have sifted them out paying no mind to them.

Talk of terrorism should be left out of this thread, if you want to discuss it, discuss it elsewhere.

The fact remains, religion is salient in American politics. Whether its Mitt Romney's Mormonism, Barack Obama's possible practice of Islam as a youngster, Giuliani's support of policies that goes against Catholic doctrine, or Mike Huckabee reminding people on TV that Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, religion matters to voters.

Yes, there were articles published concerning his religion, mainly questioning his orthodoxy, but also the possible effect on US-Arab relations if a Jewish vice-president were elected and how his support of the Iraq War would alienate Jewish Democrats. Every time he has been in the media spotlight, there have been a plethora of articles about him and his religion, ditto for the rest of them. I'm sorry if you were unaware of this fact.

Then, why is Barack Obama's Islamic herritage so worrying for some circles? This is implying that all Islamists (people who practice Islam) are the violent, barbaric terrorists which we need to prevent from entering US politics etc...Surely, the future US President does not need to worry about his or her acceptance in the Muslim worlds. The muslim world won't be dealing with Barack Obama, they will be dealing with the President of the US. There is a major difference between the two persona's. No US president will allow his personal beliefs to interfere with his decision making. He will make decisions according to US interests, not his or her personal interests!

This article is not that simple as it seems. There are very discrete and powerful messages to some circles in it in my opinion...

**Ironduke** · 12-31-2007, 13:26 PM

Quote:

This is implying that all Islamists (people who practice Islam) are the violent, barbaric terrorists which we need to prevent from entering US politics etc...

The definition of Islamist is not Muslim, Islamism is a term used to describe a generally anti-Western political ideology that holds that Islam should be the basis of government, which advocates sharia law and pan-Islamic political unity. More generally, the term is used to refer to the more extreme among these.

12-30-2007, 06:31 AM	#2 (permalink)
WhamBam Contributor Join Date: 02-27-07 Location: India Posts: 628 Country:	Pardon me if it is too obvious but is it effecting his prospects? Any drop in poll numbers? __________________ There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t..

12-30-2007, 10:43 AM	#3 (permalink)
Kansas Bear WAB Resident Historian *Senior Contributor* Join Date: 07-01-06 Location: Tornado Alley Posts: 1,516 Country:	Doesn't matter to me, if he is a Muslim or isn't a Muslim. I'd sooner vote for him than Hillary Clinton!!

12-30-2007, 12:32 PM	#4 (permalink)
TopHatter Administrator Join Date: 09-03-03 Location: Fort Myers FL Posts: 9,693 Country:	Snopes has a good article on this Urban Legends Reference Pages: Was Barack Obama A Muslim?

12-30-2007, 12:47 PM	#6 (permalink)
Khan_Han Banished Join Date: 11-16-07 Location: New South Wales Posts: 205 Country:	So what if his muslim...Isn't the USA a secular country? So whats the big deal?

12-30-2007, 17:30 PM	#10 (permalink)
Bigfella *Senior Contributor* Join Date: 01-12-07 Location: Melbourne Posts: 785 Country:	Even by the generally low & totally biased standards of 'Frontpagemag', this particular article is special. This is essentially a smear dressed up as a serious inquiry. Does it matter a whit if a pre-pubescent briefly followed the religion of his father & stepfather? no. However, if you want to try to play on the fears of the ignorant, what better way to smear him than pretend it does. It is the following scentence that reveals how utterly deviod of scholarly value this article is: "More significantly, how would more mainstream Muslims respond to him, would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy? That reaction is a real possibility, one that could undermine his initiatives toward the Muslim world." Excuse me? so, the entire point of this article is that Muslims might not respect Obama. How about an article on potential muslim attitudes to Hilary Clinton? What is Islam's take on Mormonism? Shouldn't we find out before the primaries are over? And what about Muslim attitudes to a former evangelical preacher who probably believes they are all going to hell? Lastly, can anyone even imagine such an article being written about Lieberman or any other Jewish politician? The question is absurd, yet the point is at least as relevant as anything put forth in this article. In fact, I think we can all imagine the reaction if someone wrote an article suggesting that Jews shouldn't run for President or VP because it would upset muslims. Daniel Pipes is supposed to be a respected scholar. This article tells me that assessment is WAY off the mark. He is doing a terrifylingly good impression of a gutter level political hitman with this POS.

12-30-2007, 21:01 PM	#11 (permalink)
Khan_Han Banished Join Date: 11-16-07 Location: New South Wales Posts: 205 Country:	I am sick to death with individuals who equate the whole Muslim population with terrorist filth. In my family we have 2 Christians, 1 Jew and the rest muslims. We get along perfect! Their religion or my religion for that matter is no issue. We characterize people according to their deeds, not according their religious beliefs. Yeh, there are terrorists who claim to be Muslims and yeh there are some that claim that their religion instructs them to do such sickening acts. Up until the last few years we characterized these people as suffering from religious mania. Now, mainstream society states that they are Muslims, without even identifying the group(s) involved. Whatever occurs automatically is blamed on Muslims. Yet, people forget that there are also non-Muslim terrorist organizations operating in the world. Yet, because the majority of these attacks by non-muslim terrorists do not occur in Western countries they are almost never heard of. In fact, sometimes these organizations operate in cooperation with other Terror groups based on other religions. For Example, there are also several "Christian" based, "Jewish" based, "Hindu" based and "Japanese" based (Aum Shinrikyo) recognized terror groups in the world which have conducted bombings, assassinations inter alia. Below is a non-exhaustive list of World Terrorist Organizations (The names of the religion, members of the terrorist organizations claim to belong to are in inverted comas, because I am of the opinion that no religion condones or incites terrorism): “Christian” terrorist organizations Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) (Basque Fatherland and Liberty) First of October Antifascist Resistance Group (GRAPO) Army of God - An American anti-abortion terrorist group God's Army - A terrorist group in Myanmar Nagaland Rebels (1947-present) Active in predominantly Christian state in Hindu majority India. Involved in several bombings in 2004. Claimed hundreds of lives. National Liberation Front of Tripura (1989-present) Phineas Priesthood An American based Christian Identity movement National Democratic Front of Bodoland, active terrorist in the Indian state of Assam, involved in the murder of Bineshwar Brahma, prominent Hindu Bodo activist and bombings ASALA- Christian Armenian based terrorist organization which has conducted several bombings and assassinations of diplomats in Europe and Middle-East. Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB) “Islamist” terrorist organizations Abu Sayyaf (1991-present; Islamist separatists; the Philippines) Based in the southern islands of Jolo, Basilan, and Mindanao. Branched off of the Moro National Liberation Front. Aden-Abyan Islamic Army (Yemen) Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Late 1970s-present; Islamists; Egypt) Seeks to establish Islamist state in Egypt. Usually targets secular establishments, government buildings, police, the military, minorities, tourists, and “morally offensive” buildings. Armed Islamic Group (1992-present; Islamists; Algeria) Seeks to establish Islamist state in Algeria. Began operations in 1992 after the Algerian government ignored election results that gave victory to Islamist political parties. Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades Ansar al-Islam (December 2001-present; Islamists; Iraq) Al-Qaeda (1988-present; Islamists; Afghanistan, Pakistan, and worldwide) Asbat al-Ansar (early 1990s-present; Lebanese Sunni Islamists; southern Lebanon) Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement - al-Qaeda linked separatist group in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region aiming to establish an Islamic state. Banned by China, along with related groups East Turkestan Liberation Organization, World Uighur Youth Congress and East Turkistan Information Center Egyptian Islamic Jihad - Egypt (active since the late 1970s) Fatah al-Islam - Lebanon (al-Qaeda inspired group which briefly took over Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in 2007, before being defeated by the Lebanese Armed Forces) Hamas - West Bank, Gaza Strip. Listed as a terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, the European Union, Israel, and the United States[2] Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM) - Pakistan and Kashmir Hezbollah - Lebanon; Listed as a terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States Hizbul Mujahideen - Pakistan and Kashmir Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan - Uzbekistan Jaish-e-Mohammed - Pakistan Jaish Ansar al-Sunna - Iraq Jemaah Islamiyah - Southeast Asia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi - Pakistan Lashkar-e-Toiba - Pakistan Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group - Morocco and Spain Moro Islamic Liberation Front - (Islamic separatists; the Philippines) Palestinian Islamic Jihad - Israel, West Bank, Gaza Strip People Against Gangsterism and Drugs - South Africa RSM or Rajah Solaiman Movement - Philippines Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat - Algeria Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan - Pakistan Students Islamic Movement of India - India Takfir wal-Hijra - Egypt/Sudan/Algeria Turkish Hezbollah - Kurdish organization operating in Turkey Turkish Islamic Jihad - Turkey Jewish Jewish Defense League Kach Kahane Chai (designated as terrorist by Israel, the EU, and USA) Irgun (Irgun Zvai Leumi, National Military Organization, Etzel) Sikh Babbar Khalsa- killed in excess of 1000 people International Sikh Youth Federation Khalistan Zindabad Force As one Turkish proverb puts it…Not all five fingers are the same...you cannot state or even imply that all Muslims are terrorists or that Islam is the problem! Such ignorance actually fuels more tension and hatred inter-civilisation. What must be targeted is the core of the problem(s). What must be researched is how individuals are recruited by these organizations. What leads them to do such inhumane acts? Simply stating or asserting that all Muslims are a terrorist just does not fix the problem. Mainstream Muslims are the actual ones also suffering from these terror attacks. In fact, several hundreds of Muslims have died in the bombing of the Twin Towers and the Istanbul bombing alone. Hence, Muslims are also bombed and murdered by these idiots. It's about bloody time we as society wake up and target the actual culprits not shift the blame. Shifting the blame is very easy to do...

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