By Debbie Schlussel
So, now, will all the far-left websites condemning me on my December post about Barack Hussein’s Muslim background, condemn liberal National Public Radio and FOX News commentator Juan Williams? First, the Hillary camp agrees with me, and now Juan Williams, who said:
He comes from a father who was a Muslim. I mean, I think that given we’re at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem.
Amen, Juan.
More from the
Washington Examiner’s Bill Sammon, who repeats a lot of what I’ve said on this site, but gives a little fresh info, too (I’ve skipped the stuff I already wrote about). I was right on the money about Obama’s sympathies and loyalties. To whom will he be more sympathetic and loyal–his Muslim family members or you? If you picked you, your ego needs a deflation (and your brain, an inflation):
Obama – whose father, stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims – explained his own first name, Barack, in “Dreams”: “It means ‘Blessed.’ In Arabic. [DS: Plagiarized from the Hebrew, “Baruch.”] My grandfather was a Muslim.”
In his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama added: “Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist.”
Still, when his father, a black Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, “the family wanted a Muslim burial,” Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as saying in “Dreams.”
The statement put out by Obama’s office last week referred to his father simply as “an atheist,” without mentioning his Muslim upbringing. . . .
Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, for whom the senator was given his middle name, Hussein, was fiercely devoted to Islam, according to an account in “Dreams.” The grandfather, who died in 1979, was described by his widow when Obama visited Kenya in the late 1980s.
“What your grandfather respected was strength. Discipline,’ Obama quoted his grandmother as telling him. “This is also why he rejected the Christian religion, I think.
“For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man’s sins.
“To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort women,” she added. “And so he converted to Islam – he thought its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs.”
When Obama was 2 years old, his parents divorced and his father moved away from the family’s home in Hawaii. Four years later, his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, who moved his new wife and stepson to Jakarta.
“During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school,” [DS: the one Obama is now claiming is a “public” school] Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf.’
Obama’s stepfather was a practicing Muslim.
“Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths,” Obama recalled. . . .
“It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction,” Obama recalled. “He introduced me as his son.”
Although Obama wrote of “puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer,” he was not raised as a Muslim, according to the senator’s office. Nor was he raised as a Christian by his mother, a white American named Ann Dunham who was deeply skeptical of religion.
“Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones,” Obama wrote. . . .
Later in life, however, he was drawn to the writings of an influential American Muslim who served as the spokesman for the militant Nation of Islam.
“Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different,” Obama wrote. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”
He added: “Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation.”
While working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, Obama was repeatedly asked to join Christian congregations, but begged off.
“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote. . . .
Obama’s family connections to Islam would endure, however. For example, his brother Roy opted for Islam over Christianity, as Obama recounted when describing his 1992 wedding.
“The person who made me proudest of all,” Obama wrote, “was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol.”
Meanwhile, Obama remained sharply critical of what he called ‘the religious absolutism of the Christian right.” . . .
Obama calls the Iraq war “a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country.” He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S.
“In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans ‚Ķ have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging,” he laments. “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
But the ugliest direction of all is the blind fluctuation to a Barack Hussein Obama Presidential candidacy.
