Obama 'Lying' About Muslim Past, Expert Says

[Buffmaster]

Obama 'Lying' About Muslim Past, Expert Says

October 9, 2008

By: David A. Patten




Sen. Barack Obama “is lying” when he insists that he has never prayed in a mosque and was never a Muslim, a prominent Middle East expert and journalist says.

Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum think tank, says he fully accepts that Obama is a Christian now. But there is strong evidence that Obama received a Muslim upbringing during his years in Indonesia, Pipes said.

“It’s fine with me that he was a Muslim and a convert to Christianity,” Pipes told Newsmax. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal “is a convert from Hinduism. I have no problem with his conversion. What I have a problem with is that he’s lying” when he says he was never a Muslim.

Newsmax asked whether Pipes is alleging outright that Obama has lied about having a Muslim upbringing.

Pipes’ response: “The evidence suggests to me that he is lying, yes.”

Pipes told Newsmax, “It would start with the fact that his father was a Muslim — granted, not a practicing Muslim, but in the Muslim world, if your father is a Muslim, you’re a Muslim. His father named him Hussein, which is a name only given to Muslim babies. He went with his stepfather to a mosque. They celebrated certain Muslim holidays at the mosque together. He had knowledge of the Koran. He had knowledge of Muslim prayers. You put all this together, he was a Muslim.”

Pipes contends that a Nov. 12 post on Obama’s Web site headlined, "Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," stated: "Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian."

Today, that post bears the same headline, but does not include an assertion that Obama “never prayed in a mosque” and “has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim.”

The page now bears a quote Obama made during the Jan. 15 debate on MSNBC: “In the Internet age, there are going to be lies that are spread all over the place. I have been victimized by these lies. Fortunately, the American people are, I think, smarter than folks give them credit for.”

The current post, which includes links intended to debunk any Muslim connection, is headlined “Obama Has Never Been A Muslim, And Is a Committed Christian”.

Several media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, have reported on Obama’s schooling in Indonesia, where he lived from 1967 to 1971, which included Muslim religious studies.

It is known, for example, that Obama’s designation as a Muslim while attending a Catholic school may have simply reflected the fact that his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was Muslim.

Still, Obama was grouped with Muslim students at the school and engaged in weekly religious studies, including studying the Koran and learning Muslim prayers.

In 1970, Obama’s family moved and he was enrolled in a public school where children such as Obama who were identified as Muslim spent two hours a week studying Islam.

A March 2007 Chicago Tribune article by Kim Barker, which stated several accounts had “distorted the reality” of Obama’s years in Indonesia, reported that he did irregularly attend Muslim prayer services at the local mosque.

Obama’s third-grade teacher at the Catholic school, Fermina Katarina Sinaga, told Barker that Obama accompanied his stepfather to pray at the mosque, doing so “rarely.”

Pipes said Barker’s story bolsters his position that Obama was raised as a Muslim while he lived in Indonesia. His accounts of Obama’s upbringing have received a “very severe reaction from the left” and threats from some Muslims, he said.

“The Islamists murmur and threaten,” Pipes said, declining to specify the threats he has received.

Pipes sees a whopping double standard in how the mainstream media has reported on Obama’s past.

“It’s been quite fascinating to watch the careful picking over of Sarah Palin’s record, down to her library policies as mayor of Wasilla, and her possible false pregnancies, and so forth, an analysis that involved excruciating details in her case.”

He contrasts that to the “the general pass” the media has given Obama, whether over his career in the Illinois Senate, the Annenberg library papers, or his upbringing in Jakarta. Pipes said his reports have “simply been dismissed as untrue without any facts to counter it.”

The McCain campaign “has been very cautious about looking into Barack Obama at all,” said Pipes, adding that the GOP has demonstrated a general reluctance to raise questions about Obama’s past.

Pipes has posted four articles on his Web site, “DanielPipes.org”, defending his view that Obama was a Muslim. The articles include the assertion that “for some years (Obama) had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian stepfather.”

As a measure of the interest in Obama’s background, Pipes’ articles have attracted close to half a million hits. One point of contention they raise: When someone is born of a Muslim father, do Muslims automatically consider him a Muslim?

A group of more than 50 scholars recently posted a statement on tabsir.net, a Web site dedicated to fostering an understanding of Islam, that seeks to refute that assertion. The statement maintains that distortions about Obama’s past are “part of an Islamophobic hate campaign that fuels prejudice against Americans who practice their Islamic faith and Muslims worldwide.”

Their statement says, “The vast majority of Muslims accept the Qur’anic message that there is no compulsion in Islam. Since Senator Obama was not raised as a Muslim, he cannot be held accountable for the religious status of his father.”

That assertion sounds logical to Western ears, but Pipes’ rejects it flatly.

“There is no doubt: It is a fact in Islam that the religion passes on through the father,” he told Newsmax. “And yet it’s denied as a falsehood by people who know better. They know better. It’s Islam 101.”

Supporting Pipes on that point is Shireen K. Burki, an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington. Burki, who spent her childhood studying Islam at a school in Islamabad, Pakistan, has first-hand experience as the daughter of a Muslim father and a Christian mother.

“According to Islamic jurisprudence,” she wrote in a May article in the Christian Science Monitor, “children of a Muslim father — even an apparently nonpracticing one, such as Obama’s father, and irrespective of the mother’s faith — are automatically Muslims. Most Muslims around the world agree: A child of a Muslim father is a Muslim. Period.”

Given that Obama’s profession of Christianity is essentially uncontested, one might wonder whether it really matters whether Obama once was Muslim.

To many of the world’s approximately 1.4 billion Muslims, it apparently would matter a great deal. Experts on Islam generally agree that someone who is born a Muslim (in effect, someone who had a Muslim father), who later renounces Islam, is considered an apostate.

Burki writes, “Should Obama become U.S. commander in chief, there is a strong likelihood that al-Qaida’s media arm, As-Sahab, will exploit his background to argue that an apostate is leading the global war on terror (read: attacks against fellow Muslims). This perception would be leveraged to galvanize sympathizers into action.”

She suggests the apostate tag would be a powerful propaganda weapon that al-Qaida could wield to marginalize America’s Middle East allies, causing “enormous difficulties” in the war against terror.

[AYHJA]

I mean...

Seriously...

What is it with you McCain supporters..? Take the whipping like men..! :p

[raum]

I mean...

Seriously...

What is it with you McCain supporters..? Take the whipping like men..! :p

Oh, I get it you are joking!

McCain is holding his own against Obama, who spent as much as 7 times as much money in this campaign. McCain pulled 7 independent undecided votes after the debate on CNN last night, Obama pulled 3. They started with 12 Democrats and 7 Republicans,.. sop final numbers were 15 obama, 14 McCain, 1 unstated.

They pronounced Obama victor, though McCain doubled his number with a new 7, when obama got 25% increase, or 3 more.

and that was CNN, which is heavily skewed to Obama.

I will uphold my respect for the office when either man is in it, but I still think things look good for McCain, especially in the electoral college, despite these new difficult and very inaccurate models that are measuring hype in the primetime.

[Buffmaster]

Well hell, if Obama can be president, you and I are quailified to be the CEO of IBM.

I don't think that Obama is whipping McCain because of what Obama brings to the table but because of Bush. No one in their right mind can actually say that Bush and McCain are the same. This time last year, if someone made this comparison they would've been eaten alive in the media. McCain has pissed off more people in his own party for stepping across party lines to get shit done and was loved by the party of the left.

But to be honest, I think we're fucked either way but with McCain we have some chance to make things right. Obama has too many unanswered questions to give the keys to the White House just because he's not Bush or a repub.

No matter what, I still love ya man!

[AYHJA]

Unanswered questions..? Like what Buff..? What do we need to know about Obama...And don't know...That we've known about every president hopeful before him..?

[Sir Jig-A-Lot]

What exactly can McCain make right that Obama cannot,buff?

[raum]

Here is what we need to know about his history:

Why is his Columbia record not released? What is in there?

Why is his entire life full of socialist and marxist influences?

Why did he support party financed campaigns and not do it himself?

Why did he leave the New Party, a formal Communist Party? Why did he join?

Did he or Michelle meet Bernadine Dohrn in Stidley and Austin?

Why did his grandmother get taken out of the media's limelight
when she stated he was born in Kenya? (INELIGIBLE)

Why does he advocate higher taxes to fix the world, and not give 2% of his income to charity? (Sincerity)

Why did he at first produce a forged birth certificate for proof of citizenship?
Where did he get the forged document from? Where is it now? (FELONY)

How can he claim McCain is another four more years of Bush, when he has voted more in common with Bush's approvals of legislation than McCain since Barack has been in Senate?

Deferred income specialists are leveraging the rich into Zero income decades on the possibility he is getting into office. that means his estimated tax revenues will be WAY off. Who does he plan to pick up that tax liability for his 317 Billion budget? What programs will he cut?

Some people earn nonregular income. I know someone who earns 300,000 every two years, for example (works one year for charity legal defense and volunteer firefighter, one year for money as environmental trial lawyer). How would this person be treated by his tax categories, because higher taxes would seriously impact his revenue stream's need to pay for his living expenses for 2 years. does this get weighed down to 150,000 a year?

that's for starters

[raum]

What exactly can McCain make right that Obama cannot,buff?

It's not what can't make right, it's what he is proposing and what it could make wrong.

Overstating our assets to build work corps that yield no revenue?

Overstaing our assets to socially condition kids to expect goverment to regulate their lives?

Overestimating tax revenues when the tax base he relies on can defer income for decades?

GODS WAKE UP! It is clear this man can not do what he proposes, so what is he planning to do if he is in office?

[AYHJA]

GODS WAKE UP! It is clear this man can not do what he proposes, so what is he planning to do if he is in office?

That's speculation on your part, and assuming none of us is naive to a fault, I'm sure we know that...On the other hand, it's what McCain is proposing that scares me...All those questions you asked about Obama, raum, I bet you can't answer them all for McCain and Palin either, yet, I don't see any call to see that information as well...Why not..? Why we gotta see Obama's record from Columbia, and not Palin's from one of them 6 stints at school...Why doesn't that, for example, bother you as much..?

[Sir Jig-A-Lot]

Speculation on my part: I bet there are pointed besheets in Sarah & Todd Palin's past. :)