My wife sometimes opines that I’m something of an Everyman. If she wants to know who will win an election, or what people think of a book, a movie, whatever, she asks me and I’ll reliably get the majority opinion right. A less kindly view of “Everyman” might be to allow that I’m rather more like a pillow: bearing the indentation from the last metaphorical head to lie on me…
Apparently 18% of Americans think that Obama is a Muslim, up 11% from a year ago [Article below]. What are we to make of this? Is it really true that nearly one in five Americans think that he’s an adherent of the Religion of Peace? Can they be that ignorant?
Here’s my Everyman take on it. If I were asked in a poll “Do you think President Obama is a Muslim?”, I would answer “YES”. Not because I think he is, mind. He’s a Christian. He said so. He used to go to a Church in his Chicago days, albeit one in which the Pastor was apparently a rather rabid critic of the US, some would say a “US hater”. Still, a church, not a mosque.
So why would I answer “Yes”, he is a Muslim?
Basically, as a kind of “protest vote”. That is, if he not a Muslim, nonetheless his pronouncements have been those that he would have made if indeed he were a Muslim.
He blames the west for all problems in the Islam-west relationship. His first speech to the Muslim world, in Cairo June 2009 was hugely unbalanced, blaming the west for all the ills in the Islamic world’s relationship with the west and no balancing critique of Islamic depredations on the west. He gave credit to the Islamic world for a host of inventions, nearly all of which were dubious and one of which got my son upset: that Islam invented the compass! Come on, that’s one for our part of the world, our motherland, China (we live in Hong Kong). He said Islam has always been a part of America. It hasn’t. Muslims only started coming to the US in any numbers in the 1930s and only in serious numbers in the last few decades.
He has supported the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an outfit that is trying to criminalise free speech and the criticism, any criticism, of Islam, via the United Nations.
He has appointed to his staff a Dalia Mogahed, as adviser on Islamic affairs. This woman is associated with Muslim Brotherhood organisations (the Islamic Society of North America), has supported Sharia law and the Hizb ut-Tahrir, an outfit that champions the establishment of a world-wide Islamic caliphate, with Sharia as its law.
He has supported Imam Rauf, the proponent of the Ground Zero Mosque and a fellow with a very dubious background: support for Hamas, blaming the US for 911, supporting Sharia for the US. As Cristopher Hitchens says: The more one reads through [Rauf’s] statements, the more alarming it gets”. Rauf has said moving the mosque to another location might trigger a violent reaction from the Muslim world. In other words, Rauf issues a violent threat, and Obama says nothing, but calls critics “bigots”.
He has given support to terrorists by calling on the Florida Pastor to stop his Koran burning “stunt”, rather than protecting America’s First Amendment rights and giving the terrorists due warning that any violent reactions will be dealt with severely.
He has tried to ban the association of any terrorist violence with the words “Islam” or “Jihad” – when it is blindingly obvious that those are the root cause of it, and are the very words used by those committing violent acts against the US and the west. One result of this policy was the report into the Fort Hood massacre that in its 80-odd pages did not mention “Islam”, “Jihad” or “Muslim” even once, though the shooter himself did, repeatedly and loudly.
He has pressed Israel for more concessions without seeking corresponding concessions from the Palestinians: calling on Hamas, for example to change its odious, racist, anti-semitic and murderous Charter.
So, Obama may not be a Muslim by faith. But his actions are certainly entirely consistent with someone who is a Muslim.
Americans are very fond of assessing a politician’s fealty to any particular issue by their voting record. Obama’s voting record on Islam is 100% support.
A protest vote of “yes” may well account for the rise of those saying they believe he’s a Muslim, from 11% to 18%.
One result: he has started going to church again. Perhaps he’ll now start looking at his public statements and start to support the United States and its values, as he promised to do in his Oath of Office.
A vote of “Yes, Obama is a Muslim” is a protest vote. That’s my Everyman take.
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Obama puts his Christianity out in front |
| US President Barack Obama is getting more public about his Christianity.
First he raised his Christian faith at a White House news conference this month. Then he went church for the first time in five months. And on Tuesday he responded to a question with an expansive talk about how he chose Christianity, how Jesus Christ influences his life and how he prays every day.
These public displays of his religion mark a change from the first year and a half of his presidency, when he kept his faith a largely private matter - and they come after a poll found a growing number of Americans mistakenly think he's a Muslim, or don't know his religion.
"He does seem to be talking about his faith more," said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron and a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"It stands out because he's not been overtly religious," said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University in Iowa.
On Tuesday, he gave an elaborate explanation of his faith at an event in New Mexico.
"I'm a Christian by choice," he told a woman who asked why he's a Christian. "My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead - being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me."
He acknowledged that the United States is a predominantly Christian nation, while paying homage to its religious diversity. For himself, though, he said that "understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we're sinful and we're flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God".
"But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people and do our best to help them find their own grace. And so that's what I strive to do. That's what I pray to do every day. I think my public service is part of that effort to express my Christian faith."
Obama has been a man without a regular church ever since he resigned from the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in 2008. Obama's membership in that church had become a political embarrassment after videos came to light showing racially inflammatory and anti-American sermons by pastor and Obama friend the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Obama has not joined a church in Washington and rarely attends services, saying he doesn't want to disrupt the congregations. He does consult with pastors and preachers personally, but has shied away from public discussions of his faith - at least until now.
That reticence appears to have changed since the release of a Pew poll in August that found 18 per cent of Americans saying that Obama is a Muslim, up sharply from 11 per cent in March 2009.
White House aides said there's no deliberate strategy at work to counter the false impression that Obama is a Muslim.
But Goldford said, "He's signalling he's not outside the mainstream. It can't be coincidental."
On September 19, Obama and his family prominently walked to St John's Episcopal Church across from the White House, his first visit to church since early April.
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