Forgive me for taking a page out of liberal conspiracy theory, which posited that George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 to finish a war his father had started. But could it be that Barack Obama’s continuous protestations against those who would “slander the prophet of Islam” stem from an allegiance to his paternal grandfather’s Muslim faith?
The question arose for me when I read an Associated Press news dispatch this morning containing the most recent iteration of Obama’s adamant refusal to connect radical Islam with the acts of terrorism that are perpetrated in its name. The occasion for his remarks was the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington where he declared once again that “no god condones terror.” His sermon necessarily gravitated to an unwanted discussion of the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
It’s almost as though Obama believes he knows Islam better than they do. Maybe in fact he does.
His father, he insists, was an atheist, though he freely acknowledges that his father’s father, Onyango Obama, was a practicing Muslim and that his father, Barack Obama, Sr., was brought up in a Muslim household. In 2006, then U.S. Senator Barack Obama wrote in Time magazine:
My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was 2 years old; in any event, although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition.
Perhaps a desire to connect with his past explains his unwillingness to call a spade a spade. In fact his defensiveness this morning ran much deeper than that, bordering on the bellicose. At one point he remarked that people of all faiths have been willing to “hijack religion for their own murderous ends”:
Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
So it is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.
But if, as he claims, there is “a tendency in us that can pervert and distort our faith,” why won’t he conceded that ISIS and other Islamofascists organizations are doing precisely that?
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