Thus it was all the more surprising when, once elected, Obama began to use that same “funny name” and even to speak about his “Muslim connections.” He announced in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in December 2008 that he would be sworn in as president as “Barack Hussein Obama,” but disclaimed any agenda in doing so: “I think the tradition is that they use all three names, and I will follow the tradition. I’m not trying to make a statement one way or another. I’ll do what everybody else does.”
However, in the same interview, he gave voice to a desire that would lead to his proudly proclaiming his middle name a few months later: “I think we’ve got a unique opportunity,” he told the Tribune, “to reboot America’s image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular.” He said he wanted to “create a relationship of mutual respect and partnership in countries and with peoples of good will who want their citizens and ours to prosper together.”33
OBAMA THE BELIEVER
In pursuit of these goals, when Obama made his much-anticipated major address to the Islamic world from Cairo on June 4, 2009, he proclaimed proudly that “much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected President.”34 In the same speech, he invoked the “Muslim connections” that he had derided during his campaign as dirty tactics from his political opponents: “I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims.”
However, so anxious was he to appeal to the Islamic world that he made several statements in the speech that Muslims would understand as indicating that he himself was a believer in Islam. He referred several times to the “Holy” Qur’an, and referred to “Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon them).” Muslims generally say “peace be upon him” after mentioning the name of a prophet.
Did Obama mean to imply, then, that he accepted Muhammad as a prophet? And, given the Islamic flavor of his locution here, did he mean to imply also that he accepted the Islamic understanding of Moses and Jesus not as the cardinal figures of Judaism and Christianity, respectively, but as two prophets on the roster of Muslim prophets?
It was a momentous phrase—one that could have been the subject of some intense and revealing questioning from the international media. But, of course, no such questioning was forthcoming.
Obama also extended to Muslims worldwide “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.” While he characterized this as a greeting from Muslims in America and not from him personally, his usage was significant, since assalaamu alaykum, peace be upon you, is the greeting that a Muslim extends to a fellow Muslim. And most tellingly of all, Obama said: “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” Not “where Muslims believe it was first revealed,” or “where it began,” or “where it was founded,” but “where it was first revealed.”
The choice of words was telling. Did Obama really believe, then, despite his proclamation of his Christian faith, that Islam was revealed—that is, revealed by Allah to Muhammad, not developed out of human experience? Did he mean to signal to Muslims worldwide that he believed that Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, received divine revelations that were collected in the Qur’an? Or was he a Christian of an unorthodox variety, accepting both Jesus and Muhammad, the New Testament and the Qur’an, despite the many contradictions between them?
And most important of all, what would his apparent acceptance of Muhammad and the Qur’an—at least in some form—indicate about both the veracity of statements made by his campaign in the run-up to the election? Also, what would his positive view of Islam indicate about his policies toward Israel, Iran, and the Islamic world in general, given the deeply ingrained nature of Islamic anti-Semitism and the intransigent bellicosity of traditional Islamic theology and law regarding non-Muslims?
No reporter was willing to follow up with such questions in the wake of the Cairo speech. No one seemed to pick up on just how remarkable Obama’s statements were in light of the campaign he had run.
OBAMA THE CHRISTIAN AT THE FIGHT THE SMEARS WEB SITE
“Let’s not play games,” said Barack Obama to George Stephanopoulos in a September 2008 interview. “What I was suggesting—you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you’re absolutely right that that has not come.”
Stephanopoulos quickly interjected a correction: “Christian faith.”35
Slip of the tongue?
Many who were skeptical about Obama’s campaign-era version of his early life seized upon this as evidence that he wasn’t being honest about his Muslim upbringing. And indeed, whether or not this was a slip of the tongue, there was plenty of evidence to fuel their skepticism.
“My father was from Kenya,” Barack Obama explained in December 2007, “and a lot of people in his village were Muslim. He didn’t practice Islam. Truth is he wasn’t very religious.”36 And on May 22, 2008, he said: “My father was basically agnostic, as far as I can tell, and I didn’t know him.”37
Yet as Obama prepared to deliver his major address on America and the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009, Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that “the President himself experienced Islam on three continents before he was able to—or before he’s been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world—you know, growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father.…”38
A Muslim father? So was Barack Obama, Sr., a practicing Muslim or not? And why was the president’s father, who died in 1982, an agnostic in 2008 and a Muslim in 2009?
The curiosities, discrepancies, deceptions, and mysteries just begin there.
Obama further stated in December 2007: “I was raised by my mother. So, I’ve always been a Christian. The only connection I’ve had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father’s side came from that country. But I’ve never practiced Islam. For a while, I lived in Indonesia because my mother was teaching there. And that’s a Muslim country. And I went to school. But I didn’t practice.”39
In line with this, in June 2008 the Obama campaign launched FightTheSmears.com, a Web site devoted to debunking purported lies and distortions about the candidate. Prominent among the “smears” to be debunked was the widely circulating claim that Obama was a Muslim, or at very least had been a Muslim in his youth. “Obama never prayed in a mosque,” the Web site stated. “He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ.”40
Yet there is an abundance of evidence to contradict the claims that Obama never prayed in a mosque, was never a Muslim, and was not raised a Muslim. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times wrote in March 2007—before Obama’s religious background became a point of controversy—that Obama remembered quite fondly some of his childhood lessons in Islam. “Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.’”41
Kristof also notes that Obama “once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school”—an incident Obama himself recalls in his first autobiography, Dreams from My Father: “In the Muslim school,” the future president recalled, “the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.”42
This was apparently at Public Elementary School Menteng No. 1, which Obama attended for fourth grade. In 1971 in Indonesia, when Barack Obama was in that grade, only Muslim children studied Islam in school. Christian students were in another room studying Christianity.43 According to Hardi Priyono, the vice principal for curriculum, “the Muslims learn about Islam, prayer and religious activity, and for the Christians, during the religious class, they also have a special room teaching Christianity. It’s always been like that.
”44
A teacher in the school, Tine Hahiyary (1971–1989), said of young Barry Soetoro: “I remembered that he had studied ‘mengaji’ (recitation of the Qur’an).”45 The American blogger in Indonesia who uncovered this information explained: “While the word ‘mengaji’ means to either learn or study, however, the actual usage of the word ‘mengaji’ in Indonesian and Malaysian societies means the study of learning to recite the Qur’an in the Arabic language rather than the native tongue.… To put it quite simply, ‘mengaji classes’ are not something that a non-practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to. To put this in perhaps a Christian context, this is something above and beyond simply enrolling your child in Sunday school classes. The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet.”46
So if Barry Soetoro attended Qur’an classes in his Indonesian elementary school, was Barry Soetoro a Muslim? Barry Soetoro was registered in Assisi Primary School in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1968, as an Indonesian citizen whose religion was Islam.47 Assisi was a Catholic school, and according to Israella Dharmawan, Obama’s first-grade teacher, “Barry was also praying in a Catholic way, but Barry was Muslim.” This may, however, have simply been a formality based on his stepfather’s religion: “He was registered as a Muslim,” Dharmawan continued, “because his father, Lolo Soetoro, was Muslim.”48 Maya Soetoro-Ng recalled: “My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.”49
“American Expat in Southeast Asia,” the American blogger in Indonesia who uncovered much of what we know about Obama’s Indonesia years, concludes that “the evidence seems to quite clearly show that both Ann Dunham and her husband Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo” were actually “devout Muslims themselves and they raised their son as such.”50
Thus the available evidence indicates that, contrary to the Obama campaign’s claims, Barack Obama was known to be a Muslim, was raised a Muslim for at least part of his childhood, and attended a mosque on at least a few occasions (whether or not he actually prayed in it, which was the specific claim that the Web site denied).
But he has explained nothing.
If Barack Obama was raised a Muslim, why lie on his Fight The Smears Web site? The idea that the American people, after hearing for seven years after 9/11 that Islam was a religion of peace, would reject Obama because as a child he was briefly a Muslim, is hard to believe. But Obama, instead of coming clean, has obfuscated and denied the facts. He claimed during his campaign to have been a practicing Christian for twenty years. He was, at the time, forty-seven years old. What was happening in his life prior to age twenty-seven?
Faced with the evidence of Obama’s Muslim upbringing, by October 2008 the Obama camp had revised the Web site’s statement to remove the initial sweeping claims.51 As of July 2009, the Fight The Smears site contained this much more easily defensible statement: “Barack Obama is a committed Christian. He was sworn into the Senate on his family Bible. He has regularly attended church with his wife and daughters for years. But shameful, shadowy attackers have been lying about Barack’s religion, claiming he is a Muslim instead of a committed Christian.”52
However, the original statement—“Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ”—still appears, also as of July 2009, on a page on the BarackObama.com Web site.53
The deceptions didn’t stop there.
OBAMA’S GRANDMOTHER: A CHRISTIAN IN 2008, A MUSLIM IN 2009
Sarah Hussein Obama, eighty-six, Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandmother, was angry. In March 2008, when asked about the rumors that her illustrious grandson was or had been a Muslim, she replied: “Untruths are told that don’t have anything to do with what Barack is about. I am very against it.” A photo was circulating of Obama in Muslim garb, and his grandmother was fuming. “Bringing such pictures that are trying to imply that not only is he a foreigner, he is a Muslim, is wrong, because that is not what he is.” But wasn’t the candidate’s father a Muslim? That didn’t matter, said Sarah Obama: “In the world of today, children have different religions from their parents.” The Associated Press added: “She, too, is a Christian.”54
Yet in May 2009, the Daily Times of Pakistan reported that Sarah Obama would “perform haj this year along with her son Syed Obama, a private TV channel reported on Saturday.… The channel said performing haj is one of the most desired wishes of the US president’s grandmother.”55
The haj is the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are obliged to make at least once in their lives if they are able. Non-Muslims are not permitted to make the haj or even to enter Mecca, the site of the pilgrimage and the holiest city in Islam. The highway in Saudi Arabia that leads to Mecca even has an exit labeled: “Non-Muslims must exit here.” Thus Sarah Obama’s performance of the haj means that she must be a Muslim, and that she was actually a Muslim in March 2008 (just when the presidential race was heating up) when the AP reported that she was a Christian—unless we are expected to believe that this octogenarian woman converted to Islam between March 2008 and May 2009 without attracting any attention from the international media.
Why was Obama’s grandmother represented as a Christian when she wasn’t? Who was responsible for the deception? Why didn’t the Obama campaign, in the interests of openness and full disclosure, correct the false report about the candidate’s grandmother when it circulated around the world?
And why wasn’t anyone in the mainstream media asking such questions?
Nor did Obama’s Muslim connections—connections he denied having while he was on the campaign trail—end even there.
Investor’s Business Daily reported in January 2008 that one of Obama’s half brothers, Abongo “Roy” Obama, who lives in Kenya and now goes by the name Malik, “is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must ‘liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture.’ He urges his younger brother to embrace his African heritage.”56
WHY IT MATTERS
In October 2008, former secretary of state Colin Powell expressed the mainstream view when he said on Meet the Press: “I’m also troubled by not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”57
Powell was assuming, however, that if Obama had a Muslim identity, or identified with Muslims or Islam in anyway, that this was of no greater significance than if he identified with Baptists or Methodists. Powell appeared unaware that Islam has since its inception had a political and expansionist character, and that that would mean that ties to Islam had a greater significance than simply allegiance to this or that religious group.
And Obama himself, with his Muslim father and stepfather and Muslim upbringing in Indonesia, knows the stakes involved.
It is impossible in our post-9/11 world to be a leader and not know what Islam means, or at the very least know the hell being wreaked upon the free and not-so-free world by the warriors of Islamic jihad. And Obama has already told us which side he will be on when the lines are fully drawn: “In the wake of 9/11,” he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, 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. They have been reminded tha
t the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”58
In the first year of his presidency, he showed in numerous ways that he would indeed stand with them.
It must also be noted that Islamic anti-Semitism is part of the Qur’anic imperative. The pervasive influence of Islamic Jew-hatred cannot be ignored when assessing the impact of Barack Obama’s early life experiences upon the later trajectory of his career. If a devout Muslim prays the obligatory five daily prayers, he will repeat the Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur’an, seventeen times; that chapter concludes with prayers that Muslims generally understand as asking Allah not to make the believer like the Jews (“those who have earned Allah’s anger”) or the Christians (“those who have gone astray”).59 The prayers generally conclude with the dua qunoot, a prayer that Allah’s wrath would overtake infidels.
Imagine the influence that all this—inculcating contempt for Jews and Christians seventeen times a day—might have on a young mind and a future president. Troubling psychological wiring might have been set in place for a lifetime.
Yet Obama has never spoken about the influence his early experiences with Islam had upon his mind and heart—in sharp contrast to others who were raised in Islam and left the faith. Obama would have had to make a decision to reject Islam.
If so, when did he make that decision? How?
Muslims who have left Islam are generally vocal about why they left: Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, and others have spoken out fearlessly on these issues. Obama may not wish to engage in critiques of Islam, but if he left Islam, he must have very definite thoughts about it. And even if this is simply not an important issue to him, then he can still appreciate how important it is—knowing what he knows about Islam and apostasy.
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