Today’s Google News leads with a new poll showing that 18% of Americans think that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. Only 34% of Americans think he is a Christian, down from 48% a year ago. And 43% gave the correct answer: they don’t know what he is.
The great physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said of a colleague’s work, “It isn’t even wrong,” and one might say about Obama that he isn’t even a Muslim. The fact that he was registered as a Muslim at an Indonesian school by his Muslim stepfather does not make him a Muslim; he attended a notionally Christian church pastored by Jeremiah Wright, whose “black liberation” theology teaches that blacks are the chosen people.
Whether Wright is a Christian, of course, is a question to be answered by Christian theologians and not by this Jewish journalist. But a nasty streak of ethnic idolatry is hard to miss in the published views of Wright’s mentor James Cone.
All that is beside the point. That Obama has a deep personal sympathy for Islam is beyond doubt. The President takes every opportunity to emphasize it. But he is not a Muslim, only the thrice-abandoned child and step-child of Muslims and an anthropologist mother who deeply sympathized with the struggle of Muslims to resist globalization. He has a deep antipathy to the American view of things, insisting that “American exceptionalism” is no different than “Greek exceptionalism.” He belongs neither to the United States, nor to the Muslim world; he is a gifted outsider with a talent for persuasion who profiled Americans the way anthropologist profile primitive tribes, and in a variant of the old adventure-movie script, made himself our king.
Ultimately he belongs nowhere. He is not even a Muslim.
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