The Problems With Junior

As the sleek veneer begins to fade and tarnish, and as a reticent media feels the unrelenting tug of duty - or perhaps shame - the questions about Obama's past are finally gaining credibility and momentum. Furthermore, the notions of his incompetency and ineligibility are suddenly seeming more plausible to a larger portion of Americans, no longer cavalierly dismissed with a shrug and a wave of the hand.

I was among a sizeable crowd of bloggers and pundits who were sounding the alarm about Obama's past associations, from William Ayers to Reverend Wright. But the core of Obama's character was formed long before he would meet either of those men. It is derived from the dreams of his father and the call to prayer in Jakarta.

While the buzz lately is about the percentage of people who believe Obama to be a Muslim, the media elites are demanding to know how so many people could be so gullible, an irony I find immensely amusing. Equally as ironic is their intense desire to convince those "gullible" people that the President is a Christian, a group they are normally engaged in mocking.

But to believe that Obama is a Muslim is less of a stretch than vice versa. While he may not be a practicing or active Muslim, there is no question that he is a cultural Muslim. He was born to a Muslim father and an atheist mother. In the world of Islam, he is a Muslim. For him to claim otherwise makes him an Apostate, one more hated by Muslims than even infidels, but we'll get to that particular problem later.

His birth to Barack Sr. makes him a Muslim, that much is clear. What Junior chose to become later in life may have meaning to him or not, but to Muslims, he will always be a Muslim. That was clear throughout the campaign, when people like Mohamar Gadhafi were enthralled at the prospect of a Muslim becoming president of the United States. Louis Farrakhan, leader of The Nation of Islam, felt the same way. Remember these pertinent facts, they will come in handy.

Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, divorced Barack Sr. when the president was three years old, ostensibly because she discovered that the father of her child already had a wife and family back in Kenya. She subsequently married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian man working towards his masters degree at the University of Hawaii. When Obama was five years old, Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia by his government. A year later, Ann Dunham and her six-year-old followed. Soetoro eventually adopted Obama, who then became young Barry Soetoro.

So the young Soetoro was now an Indonesian citizen, and attended madrassa, taking reading lessons on the Qur'an. Obama has confided that he once got in trouble for making faces during Qur'an studies. He himself has stated recently that the sweetest sound he ever heard was the Muslim call to prayer at sunset. During an interview with George Stephanopoulos in the campaign season of 2008, Obama slipped, referring to "my Muslim" faith. (Stephanopoulos dutifully corrected the gaffe).



Since he's been president, Obama has spent more time reaching out to Muslims and slamming Israel, defending the Ground Zero mosque while decrying home building in Jerusalem. He's coddled Iran - the country he said he would never permit to have a nuclear weapon - and as a result, Achmedinejad has jammed his thumb in our eye. In a matter of hours, Iran and Russia will begin loading fuel rods into the newly finished nuclear reactors.

Obama spoke in Cairo, Egypt, where he offered apologies on our behalf for having been "arrogant", something I personally did not need representation on in such fashion. But the interesting part is the fact that he made it out of there alive. Here's why.

According to the Qur'an, an Apostate is a Muslim who has committed a worse crime than murder; conversion from Islam. Don't take my word for it, however, read from a "newspaper" that has, since the election, become the official propaganda machine of the Obama administration, The New York Times:

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.

For example, in Iran in 1994 the intervention of Pope John Paul II and others won a Christian convert a last-minute reprieve, but the man was abducted and killed shortly after his release. Likewise, in 2006 in Afghanistan, a Christian convert had to be declared insane to prevent his execution, and he was still forced to flee to Italy.

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards.

Curious, the reception he received in a Muslim country, then. So when people like Joel Achenbach write OpEd's in the Washington Post titled, "Are Americans total numbskulls?", the question must be reversed upon them immediately. Is Obama a Muslim, or an Apostate? For someone who should be most reviled in a Muslim country, he certainly seemed cozy. Perhaps he didn't convert? Or he returned?

Claiming that he and his family would find a new church in the DC area by Easter, that hasn't happened. The excuse is that he doesn't want to be a disruption. Apparently that is only true of a Christian church as he and his family don't seem to mind fouling traffic on the streets and airports on New York, feel comfortable closing sections of prime beach areas in Spain, and cause security havoc at professional sporting events. Nope, we can't attend church because we'll "interfere".

Maybe Obama is a Christian Apostate. He's safe, there is no penalty for that in the true religion of peace beyond disappointment. "How can people believe that Obama is a Muslim?" How can they deny it?

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Just Like You

Pandering politicians are nothing new. Raising the practice to an art form is...

To paraphrase an old saying, wherever Barack Obama goes, there he is, and while politicians have long sought to fit in with the communities in which they are currently stumping for votes, it is a rare practice for one who is victorious in an election. I cannot recall a U.S. president prior to the current one that so closely resembled a chameleon. Past presidents - when travelling abroad - proudly embodied the American spirit. Not so with Obama.

In his recent tours of the world, he has endeavored to remind the peoples to whom he was speaking that he is "just like them" and, therefore, understands them. In Cairo, he reminded the crowd of his "Muslim heritage", even though he vehemently denied that heritage during the campaign. And this past week in Ghana, he administered the same confession to Africans, pointing out that he has "the blood of Africa within me".

That could be an innocuous, vague reference to his being half African American. He went on, though, to say something that could once again raise the low-simmering controversy over his qualifications to be POTUS in regards to the never-seen birth certificate (Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, be damned). He said, "Countries like Kenya, which had a per capita economy larger than South Korea's when I was born, have been badly outpaced." (Emphasis mine).

If he had substituted "in the early sixties" or "forty-eight years ago" for "when I was born", the significance would have escaped notice. However, describing the economic or societal condition of a country at the time he was born lends an air of personal experience, at least in my mind. For example, I wouldn't think to describe what it might have been like in China when I was born. I would be more inclined to refer to the, uh...middle of the twentieth century.

There is a technical word that describes a "Freudian Slip": it is Parapraxis and it defines a phrase that inadvertently reveals a truth that the speaker would have preferred to have kept hidden. We know so little of the mysterious ascension of Barack Obama, the orphaned lad who attended the best schools and attained privileged status so quickly. We know nothing of the origins of the funding necessary to have accomplished the things he has. It's almost like he is the fictional character Kyle XY , the difference being that in the show, Kyle didn't know his origins, either. More significantly, Kyle wasn't the leader of the free world. That leader, Obama, knows his origins well and does his best to conceal them, along with whomever was responsible for his meteoric rise to prominence.

And just as an aside...I hope you all noticed that Obama was adorned with a black cowboy hat in the accompanying photo. Some may cry "symbolism over substance", but in the case of Obama, it may be best for them to rely heavily on the symbolism, since the substance is in short supply.

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Hip To Be Square

Back in the 1980's, Huey Lewis and the News had a hit song - Hip To Be Square - that observed that what was once considered undesirable was now in vogue. In the 60's and more so in the 70's, being square was the opposite of hip, which everyone wished to be. Once the majority of people considered themselves to be hip, it went out of fashion and as Lewis points out in the song, it suddenly became hip to be square.

During the long campaign for the presidency of the United States, the ultimate victor, Barack Hussein Obama, was hyper-sensitive on the campaign trail about his middle name, insisting that it not be used when referring to him and lashing out at those who dared to do so. John McCain actually apologized for a radio host who, announcing McCain at a campaign event, had the temerity to utter the terrible complete name of his opponent, Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama himself went out of his way to portray himself as a Christian, relying on his soon-to-be toxic pastor and his church as proof. So careful was he to avoid and conceal his Muslim roots for fear of alienating the American voters, coming so relatively close on the heels of the attacks of 9/11/2001, that his handlers and media enablers were scornful of anyone who mentioned it at all. Cable talking heads debated at length the merit of using his middle name. After all, they said, many past presidents used their middle names, why not this one?

The answer is simple; it was to conceal the truth until after the election. The tactic worked brilliantly. We now have a Muslim president, who recently declared that "if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world". But here's an example of his rhetoric on the campaign trail. Speaking to a crowd in Pennsylvania in September, 2008, he said:

"I know that I'm not your typical presidential candidate and I just want to be honest with you. I know that the temptation is to say, 'You know what? The guy hasn't been there that long in Washington. You know, he's got a funny name. You know, we're not sure about him.' And that's what the Republicans when they say this isn't about issues, it's about personalities, what they're really saying is, 'We're going to try to scare people about Barack. So we're going to say that, you know, maybe he's got Muslim connections.'...Just making stuff up."

As we're now learning, the Republicans weren't "just making stuff up", and the people had every reason to be scared because what was once taboo is now perfectly a-okay. Two months ago in Ankara, Obama was introduced to the Turkish Parliament as Barack Hussein Obama, and Keith Olbermann never batted an eye or popped a vein in protest at the use of his Messiah's middle name. (The jury is still out as to whether the event sent a thrill up Chris Matthews' other leg).

There must have been a level of cognizance on the part of Obama that the American people wouldn't vote for him if he were overtly Muslim or there would have been no need to be clandestine about it in the first place. So what is it that makes him now believe that it's hip to be Muslim? Just ask him, he'll be glad to tell you. He'd likely say, "Because I won" when what he really means is, "We won".

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