Thursday, 29 March 2012 12:41 By John Feffer, TomDispatch | News Analysis
Those who fervently believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim
generally practice their furtive religion in obscure recesses of the Internet.
Once in a while, they’ll surface in public to remind the news media that no
amount of evidence can undermine their convictions.
In October 2008, at a town hall meeting in Minnesota for Republican presidential
candidate John McCain, a woman called
Obama “an Arab.” McCain responded, incongruously enough, that Obama was, in
fact, “a decent family man” and not an Arab at all. In an echo of this, a woman
recently stood up at a town hall in Florida
and began a question for Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by asserting that the president “is an avowed Muslim.” The
audience cheered, and Santorum didn’t bother to correct her.
Though they belong to a largely underground cult, the members of the
Obama-is-Muslim congregation number as many as one third of all Republicans. A recent poll found that only 14% percent of Republicans in Alabama and Mississippi
believe that the president is Christian.
These true believers treat their scraps of evidence like holy relics: the
president’s middle name, his grandfather’s religion, a widely circulated photo of Obama in a turban. They occasionally traffic in
outright fabrications: that he attended a radical madrasa in Indonesia as a
child or that he put his hand on the Qur’an to be sworn in as president. An
even more apocalyptic subset believes Obama to be nothing short of the
anti-Christ.
By and large, however, this cult doesn’t attract mainstream support from the
larger church of Obama haters. Indeed, these more
orthodox faithful have carefully shifted the debate from Obama being Muslim to
Obama acting Muslim. Evangelical pundits, presidential candidates, and the
right-wing media have all ramped up their attacks on the president for, as
Baptist preacher Franklin Graham put it recently on MSNBC, “giving Islam a pass.”
The conservative mainstream still calls the president’s religious beliefs into
question, but they stop just short of accusing him of apostasy and concealment.
What they consider safe is the assertion that Obama is acting as if he were
Muslim. In this way, Republican mandarins are cleverly channeling a conspiracy
theory into a policy position.
There is a whiff of desperation in all this. After all, it’s not an easy
time for the GOP. The economy shows modest signs of improvement.
The Republican presidential candidates are still engaged in a fratricidal
primary. By expanding counterterrorism operations and killing Osama bin Laden,
the president has effectively removed national security from the list of
Republican talking points.
One story, however, still ties together so many narrative threads for
conservatives. Charges that the president is a socialist or a Nazi or an
elitist supporter of college education certainly push some buttons. But the
single surefire way of grabbing the attention of the media and the public -- as
well as appealing to the instincts of the Republican base -- is to assert,
however indirectly, that Barack Obama is a Manchurian candidate sent from the
Islamic world.
Obama and the Muslim World
A succession of Republican candidates have attempted to run to the right of
party favorite Mitt Romney by asserting that only a true conservative can
defeat Obama in November. Most of them boasted of the same powerful backer.
Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum all declared that
God asked them to run for higher office. Together with Newt Gingrich, they have
deployed various methods of appealing to their constituencies, but none is more
potent than religion.
Rick Santorum, a Catholic and the favorite of the evangelical community, has
been particularly adept at using his soapbox as a pulpit. The president
subscribes to a “phony theology,” Santorum has claimed, “not a theology based on the Bible, a
different theology.” Although he occasionally asserts that “Obama’s personal
faith is none of my concern,” he nonetheless speaks of the president’s attempt
to “impose values on people of faith”-- implying that the president is
certainly no member of that community.
In his attacks on the president’s spirituality, Santorum is cleverly attacking
Mitt Romney’s Mormonism as well (a theology also based on text other than the
Bible). At the same time, the suggestion that Obama is somehow “other” operates
as a code word for “Black” in a race in which race goes largely unmentioned.
It’s an odd set of charges. Obama, after all, did everything possible during
his first presidential campaign to foreground his Christianity. He was
repeatedly seen praying in churches and assiduously avoided mosques. He never
made a campaign appearance with a prominent Muslim. He talked about his
“personal relationship” with Jesus Christ.
The day after he clinched the Democratic Party nomination in 2008, he gave a
speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in which he
reaffirmed that he was “a true friend of Israel.” Although he would
occasionally mention his Muslim relatives and the time he spent in Indonesia as a
child, he generally did whatever he could to emphasize only two out of the
three major monotheisms.
As president, Obama has certainly “reached out” to the Muslim world. In Cairo, in June 2009, he spoke of seeking “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one
based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and
Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”
That new beginning, however, has yet to come. At home, for example, the Obama
administration provided federal funds that the New York City Police
Department then used to expand its surveillance of Muslim American
neighborhoods. (Even the CIA was involved in this “human mapping” project.) The FBI has
spent the Obama years rounding up suspected Muslim terrorists in operations
that flirt dangerously with entrapment. The administration has
expanded the no-fly list, though because the list is secret it’s difficult to
know whether Muslim-Americans are specifically profiled. Anecdotal evidence,
however, suggests that they are.
The administration’s record internationally is even more disappointing. The
conduct of U.S. troops in Afghanistan --
the night raids, massacres (including the recent murders of 16 Afghan
villagers), and the Qur’an burnings -- have enraged local Muslims. Obama has
expanded the CIA’s drone air campaign by a considerable margin in the Pakistani
borderlands. Civilian casualties, overwhelmingly Muslim, continue to occur
there and in other “overseas contingency operations” as U.S. Special Operations
Forces have dramatically expanded their activities in the Muslim world.
Despite right-wing charges, Obama has maintained a tight relationship with Israel and the
Israeli leadership. As former New
Republic editor Peter
Beinart concludes, “The story of Obama’s relationship to [Prime
Minister] Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies is, fundamentally, a story
of acquiescence.”
It’s no surprise, then, that surveys in six Middle East countries taken just
before and two months after the Cairo speech in 2009, the Brookings Institution
and Zogby International discovered that the number of respondents optimistic about
the president’s approach to the region had suffered a dramatic drop: from 51%
to 16%. A 2011 Pew poll found that U.S.
favorability ratings had continued their slide in Jordan
(to 13%), Pakistan (12%),
and Turkey
(10%).
And yet, perversely, the hard right in the U.S. maintains that the Obama
administration has behaved in quite the opposite manner. “There’s something
sick about an administration which is so pro-Islamic that it can’t even tell
the truth about the people who are trying to kill us,” Republican presidential
candidate Newt Gingrich typically said while campaigning in Georgia.
Pro-Islamic? That’s news to the Islamic world.
But it’s nothing new to the world of the U.S. right wing, which portrays
Obama as anti-Israel and weak in the face of Islamic terrorism. At best, the
president emerges from these attacks as a booster of Islam; at worst, he is the
leader of a genuine fifth column.
Although the administration’s policy on Iran is virtually indistinguishable
from those of his Republican challengers, they have presented him as an
appeaser. The president who “surged” in Afghanistan somehow becomes,
through the magic of election-year sloganeering, a pacifist patsy. Although
Obama never endorsed the location of the “Ground Zero mosque,” his opponents have suggested that he did. Although he was slow to
withdraw support from U.S.
allies in the Middle East like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt
and Ben Ali in Tunisia,
Republican candidates have accused the president of practically campaigning on behalf
of the Islamist parties that have grown in influence as a result of the Arab
Spring.
Barack Obama, the right wing has discovered, does not have to be Muslim to
convince American voters that he has a suspect, even foreign, agenda. They have
instead established a much lower evidentiary standard: he only has to act
Muslim.
For this, they don’t need a birth certificate. All they need are allegations,
however spurious, that the president is in league with Iran’s
Ahmadinejad, Arab Spring jihadists, and anti-Israel forces at home. This more
subtle but no less ugly Islamophobia has already insinuated itself into the
2012 elections in a potentially more damaging way than did the overt
disparagement of Obama’s religious bona fides back in 2008.