By Debbie Schlussel
**** UPDATE, 01/30/08: EXCLUSIVE – Obama’s Nation of Islam Staffers, Edward Said & “Inflexible Jews” Causing Mid-East Conflict: An Obama Insider Reveals the Real Barack
**** UPDATE, 01/25/07: Barack Hussein Obama’s alleged debunking of Islamic background raises even MORE questions. ****
**** UPDATE, 01/19/07: Looks like Hillary Clinton’s camp agrees with me and has dug up more info that confirms my suspicions about Obama and his Muslim background, including his attendance at a Wahabbi (ie., extremist Sunni) Madrassa (Islamic religious academy). Hillary’s camp says Obama is covering up his Muslim past. Why? ****
Many months ago, readers began asking me whether Barack Obama is Muslim. Since he identifies as a Christian, I said, “no,” and responded that he was not raised by his Kenyan father.
But, then, I decided to look further into Obama’s background. His full name–as by now you have probably heard–is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Hussein is a Muslim name, which comes from the name of Ali’s son–Hussein Ibn Ali. And Obama is named after his late Kenyan father, the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., apparently a Muslim.
And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that’s not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he’s a Christian, but they do not.

Then, there are the other items in his background. As best-selling author Scott Turow wrote in Salon, Obama went to a Muslim school for two years in Indonesia. His mother, Anna, married an Indonesian man (likely another Muslim, as Indonesia is Muslim-dominated and has the largest Islamic population in the world).
And Obama has a “born-again” affinity for the nation of his Muslim father, Kenya, and his Kenyan sister. (Although Kenya is largely Christian, it has a fast-growing Muslim population that has engaged in a good deal of religious violence and riots against Christians. And Kenyan courts will apply Sharia law, when the participants are Muslim.) Wrote Turow:

Obama’s father died in a traffic accident in Nairobi in 1982, but while Obama was working in Chicago, he met his Kenyan sister, Auma, a linguist educated in Germany who was visiting the United States. When she returned to Kenya in 1986 to teach for a year at the University of Nairobi, Obama finally made the trip to his father’s homeland he had long promised himself. There, he managed to fully embrace a heritage and a family he’d never fully known and come to terms with his father, whom he’d long regarded as an august foreign prince, but now realized was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities.

So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?
Is that even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the Vice Presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?
NO WAY, JOSE . . . Or, is that, HUSSEIN?