Category Archives: Islam

Updated: Not Quite Muslim; Not Quite Christian

“When Barack Obama looked Americans in the metaphoric eye and told them he was not and was never a Muslim, he had, admittedly, been worshipping at the Trinity United Church of Christ for twenty odd years. So we know for certain that he is not a Christian.

Obama’s voodoo theology aside, do we know with the same certainty that he was never Muslim?

In my new column I conclude that “Hussein’s a hip hybrid: not quite Muslim; not quite Christian. And, if elected, he’ll be the first post-American president in a post-Christian America.”

Read the complete column, “Not Quite Muslim; Not Quite Christian,” on WorldNetDaily.com.

Update: Hereunder in the Comments Section, anon makes an important observation about Indonesia, “the world’s largest Islamic nation.” As far as I know, nobody in US media, myself included, has made this point.

Updated: True Colors?

Barack Obama, Islam, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Pop-Culture

Is this a metaphor for radicalism, or just a bit of satire?

The New Yorker’s latest cover features the Obamas in full regalia, fist bumping under a portrait of Osama. He is in a Muslim mumu, she is accoutered like a terrorist—with an AK-47 and a Black Panther’s afro, except that her expression is far less furrowed and ferocious than it usually is. The American flag burns in the background.

To quote the ditty Cindy Lauper popularized,

I see your true colors shining through
I see your true colors
And that’s why I love you
So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful

Update (July 17): Media have stated categorically that—sniker, sniker—the “rumor” of Obama’s Muslim affiliation is preposterous. Only a troglodyte would entertain such a proposition.

But that’s not what Daniel Pipes says. (Let’s dispense with the Pipes swipes, and with the validity of ad hominem in argument, RIGHT NOW, before we proceed, please.)

In any event, Dr. Pipes makes reasonable points in “Barack Obama’s Muslim Childhood”:

…Obama’s Kenyan birth father: In Islam, religion passes from the father to the child. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) was a Muslim who named his boy Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Only Muslim children are named “Hussein”.

Obama’s Indonesian family: His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: “My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.” An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that “All the relatives of Barry’s father were very devout Muslims.”

Barack Obama’s Catholic school in Jakarta.
The Catholic school: Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that “documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim” while at a Catholic school during first through third grades. Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune confirms that Obama was “listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school.” A blogger who goes by “An American Expat in Southeast Asia” found that “Barack Hussein Obama was registered under the name ‘Barry Soetoro’ serial number 203 and entered the Franciscan Asisi Primary School on 1 January 1968 and sat in class 1B. … Barry’s religion was listed as Islam.”

The public school: Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Indonesians familiar with Obama when he lived in Jakarta that he “was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended.” Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star visited the Jakarta public school Obama attended and found that “Three of his teachers have said he was enrolled as a Muslim.” Although Siddiqui cautions that “With the school records missing, eaten by bugs, one has to rely on people’s shifting memories,” he cites only one retired teacher, Tine Hahiyari, retracting her earlier certainty about Obama’s being registered as a Muslim.

Barack Obama’s public school in Jakarta.
Koran class: In his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, Obama relates how he got into trouble for making faces during Koranic studies, thereby revealing he was a Muslim, for Indonesian students in his day attended religious classes according to their faith. Indeed, Obama still retains knowledge from that class: Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times, reports that Obama “recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them [to Kristof] with a first-rate accent.”

Mosque attendance: Obama’s half-sister recalled that the family attended the mosque “for big communal events.” Watson learned from childhood friends that “Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque.” Barker found that “Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers.” One Indonesia friend, Zulfin Adi, states that Obama “was Muslim. He went to the mosque. I remember him wearing a sarong” (a garment associated with Muslims).

Piety: Obama himself says that while living in Indonesia, a Muslim country, he “didn’t practice [Islam],” implicitly acknowledging a Muslim identity. Indonesians differ in their memories of him. One, Rony Amir, describes Obama as “previously quite religious in Islam.”

Obama’s having been born and raised a Muslim and having left the faith to become a Christian make him neither more nor less qualified to become president of the United States. But if he was born and raised a Muslim and is now hiding that fact, this points to a major deceit, a fundamental misrepresentation about himself that has profound implications about his character and his suitability as president.

Read the complete article.

Pedigreed Islamic Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism, Islam, Judaism & Jews

In a WorldNetDaily.com review of our friend Andrew Bostom’s new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, Alyssa A. Lappen
writes:

“Particularly since the late, lifelong Muslim Brother, Yasser Arafat, shifted anti-Israel jihad into fifth gear in September 2000, several Middle East and Islamic scholars have repeatedly asserted that 20th and 21st century Islamic anti-Semitism sprang solely from Nazi and European Christian influence.”

“Even now, Islamophiles like Bernard Lewis preach (as it were) that virulent Jew-hatred is not inherent to Islam – but rather, anti-Semitism migrated to the Middle East with European colonialism. The Quran uses ‘hard words … about the Jews,’ even Lewis admits. Yet under Islamic rule, he claims they were ‘only rarely subject to persecution’ and ‘their situation was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst. …'”

“Dr. Andrew G. Bostom’s extensive, scientific and largely unprecedented new book, ‘The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History’, definitively disproves such claims. (Full disclosure: I copy-edited several of these first-time English translations, and proofread many chapters.)”

“Publication of this landmark book informs self-respecting scholars, they can no longer shamelessly blame Christianity as the sole source of anti-Semitism – or more importantly, that Islam does not and never had its own innate brand of loathing for the Jewish people. Islam detests non-Muslims generally – whom sharia laws institutionally oppress and tax as underclass ‘dhimmis’ – but inveighs especially intense odium against Jews…”

ILANA here: almost intractably ingrained among Jews themselves is the perception of Christianity as a source of all things bad for them. Not a week goes by when I am not laboriously explaining to relatives that, no, Hagee is not about to ride into Pittsburgh to conduct a pogrom. Jews, especially those residing in Eurabia, had better begin to better tell their friends from their foes. I imagine it must piss off a friend immensely when nothing he does satisfied the Stiff-Necked Ones.

Read the rest here, and, naturally, buy the Bostom book.

Update 4: Huffing Over Hagee

Christian Right, Islam, John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Neoconservatism

Desperate to create a Rev. Wright parallel in John McCain’s political universe, liberal madmen have been gleeful about uncovering Reverend Hagee’s many controversial statements. Hagee, an enormously powerful evangelical who’d endorsed McCain, has since withdrawn his endorsement.

Keith Olbermann, who barks orders AT his viewers as a Soviet commissar might do—but not as a TV talker ought to—offered up Hagee’s words:

“God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land”; the Roman Catholic Church is “the great whore”; “Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for homosexual sin.”

Olbermann had a giant “gotta moment” when it transpired too that Ohio megachurch pastor and author Rod Parsley, an “evangelical supporter of McCain,” had “sharply criticized Islam, calling the religion [an] inherently violent,” “anti-Christ religion,” and “the Muslim prophet Muhammad ‘the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.’”

So? Many respectable scholars concur. Many more Americans agree.

As to the first thing that had Olbermann elated: As I understand them, many Christians believe that, good or bad, God controls events and that there is a method in the madness around us, and in unfolding events in general.

Hagee, moreover, is an eschatological scholar. As such, his raison d’être is an overriding concern with “the end of the world or of humankind,” and all that stuff.

Update 1: Obama clearly wants a quid pro quo. He has implied that, just as he doesn’t hold Hagee against McCain, so too should the Arizonan not be encumbered by Hagee. Meanwhile, McCain is bending over backwards to denounce Hagee, which only helps legitimize the media-manufactured parallels between Hagee and Wright. McCain is stupid. (But then I’ve said so before.)

Update 2 (May 23): PARSING PARSLEY. First off, to be anti-Islam is not to be anti-Muslim. This distinction is conveniently collapsed by the left-liberals piling on Hagee. Islam is indeed a violent creed, conducive to violence. Come back to me on that, when you’ve perused our Islam Archive, where you’ll find references to many reliable sources. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel here for those who do not want to do the reading.

Pastor Rod Parsley also said that “America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed.” We live in the YouTube age, when every botched, unfortunate utterance by a public figure is dissected ponderously, after which denunciations are issued and apologies exacted.

Please calm down to a blind panic.

The estimable Robert Spencer has parsed Parsley’s statement. I take a different tack to the tack taken in the first part of Robert’s assessment: “Statements like that give the anti-jihad movement a wingnut patina that, of course, ABC is happy to perpetuate in this anti-McCain hit piece.”

Parsley, clumsily, was probably referring to the hard-core Christianity that early Americans espoused. They would surely never countenance Islam.

I see Parsley and Hagee, with all their faults, as “ours,” if you know what I mean. They’re warrior Christians. Granted, I’m not; besides being an irreligious Jew, I oppose aggressive wars. Still, Hagee is a crusader of sorts. He belongs squarely within the tradition of a vigorous, fighting Christendom. He’s an anachronism (but so am I in many ways) and he’s indubitably of the West.

Rev. Wright, on the other hand, is not “ours” in any way. His thinking is non-western, alien. He comes to destroy the West, as he hates with all his might the men who founded it.

The kind of rabbis who condemn Hagee as an anti-Semite—they’re engaged in grand-scale projection, for they, not Hagee, will help bring about the end of a West, after which Jews will be even less secure. Very many liberal rabbis are honorary Muslims, or dhimmis, as far as I’m concerned. Hagee is an honorary Jew.

Update 3 (May 24): Sigh. There are those who argue against Hagee and all else they dislike by declaring themselves and their opinions as the norm, the magical mean. Evangelicals are, apparently, outside the norm. Now there’s a rational argument. That’s profoundly annoying to this writer, especially when contributors do so in defiance of facts.

Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers, whatever—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs, is as American as apple pie. Ever heard of the First and Second Great Awakenings? “Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution [no less], which took place soon after.”

Afrocentrism, on the other hand—Wright’s creed—is as American as Idi Amin. African-Americans, I suggest, are morel likely to be evangelicals than Afrocentrists.

Update 4 (May 25): This is not a statement of support for either tradition, but merely a statement of historical truths vis-à-vis America’s creedal nature. (If I am not wrong, revivalists were active in the abolitionist movement.) Do I personally have more affinity for a Zionist Christian (Hagee) than an anti-Zionist, Afrocentrist of the left (Wright)?

You bloody bet.

But that’s because I’m a woman of the Right, not a neoconservative. Neoconservatives have very little patience or affinity for “their own.” As I’ve written, “Neo-con nirvana is a U.S.-supervised world where Afghani and Israeli alike are fashioned into global democrats, citizens of the world.” (A mold, incidentally, to which Wright would be infinitely more suitable than Hagee.) I’ve long maintained that neocons—they’re crypto-leftists—are as deracinated as any good left-liberal.

Neoconservatives, moreover, have always evinced contempt toward the Religious Right. You’d think the likes of Hagee would have learned. In fact, neocons consider the Religious Right a bunch of rube hicks. I’ll take the rubes any day over the wretched neocons, the two factions’ philosophical overlap notwithstanding.