As the Twig is Bent, So Grows the Tree: Why I Think of President Obama as a Muslim
As a political scientist, I’ve always thought of Obama as a Muslim if only because I tend to categorize people by the cultural influences which impact them as children. Early influences, for example, help us predict later political party affiliations.
Surprisingly, Pew reports that the number of Americans who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim has jumped from 12% in early 2009 to 18% in 2010. Similarly, Pew reports a decline in the number of respondents who identify Obama as a Christian – 34% today compared to 48% in March 2009 and 51% during the Presidential campaign in October 2008. As usual, there is a less decisive group floating out there – adding up to a plurality of 43% – who respond that they do not know what is Obama’s religion. These undecided respondents are up from 34% in 2009.
I’m certain that if Pew telephoned me, I would have been one of the folks who said Obama was a Muslim and who would not have been given the time to fully explain what I mean.
First, I know that Obama’s step-father, Lolo Soetoro, was a practicing Muslim. According to freely available press accounts, Soetoro took little Obama with him to the mosque to pray and enrolled little Obama in school as a Muslim.
Second, I know that Obama grew up in a predominantly Muslim country, Indonesia. Third, when I met the young Obama – while he was a sophomore at Occidental College – I can report that his closest friends were the Muslim Pakistani students on campus, in particular, an older Pakistani student named Mohammed Hasan Chandoo.
Hasan visited Obama while he was a student at Columbia and attended Obama’s wedding to Michelle in 1992, unlike the African-Americans at Occidental who now claim they were close friends with the young Obama,.
As for Obama’s more contemporary connections to Islam, I pay the most attention to his words in his book, Audacity of Hope, where Obama calls into question the 
divinity of Christ. This is, in my view, a bright dividing line between being a Christian believer and being a Muslim adherent.
I also know that Rev. Wright is a former Muslim and maintains close ties to the Muslim community. All of this information gives me confidence that Obama’s world view, his basic mental architecture, has more links to Islam than Christianity.
Nevertheless, I’m sure the media will spin the results of Pew’s poll as evidence of racism or religious intolerance or an effort to portray Obama as the “other.” My perspective, however, gives me an advantage over mainstream journalists who are puzzled about how Obama could be so completely foolish as to endorse the Ground Zero Mosque. In my view, he is simply defending his base, a base of Muslim adherents to whom Obama has shown considerable loyalty ever since he was a little child.
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He is not a mulsim, for he says he is a Christian and worships in a Church. That would be disallowed if he were a muslim, how many Muslims do you know you worship in Churches?
The other question – so what if he is a Muslim. As long as he does his job then the religion (or no religion) of the President is irrelevant. You are obvioulsy not a Libertarian. Dr Paul has clearly said that religious affliaitaion is irrelevant, it is what someone does that matters.
I agree with the author, Mike. I also think it makes a difference to the country as a whole that BO is either hiding his religion or is so conflicted that he is torn between the two or three. He MAY worship in a Christian-like church with others who are ALSO CONFLICTED, but his heart seems to go to his youth. I have great concern that Islam lets it go (his perceived/or not alliances with other religions) because of his great value as a TOOL. The leader of our country needs to have his priorities straight, his fundamental base/core beliefs. While Dr. Paul may THINK religious affiliation IS irrelevant, I believe it COULD BE irrelevant in certain persons if all else were steady, but this does not seem to be the case with this particular man. BO also seems to me to not give much care/thought about the traditions/beliefs of the country he was elected to lead or give much toward uniting people to work for greatness and the continued sovereignty of the US. It seems to me that he projects HIS OWN convoluted dream upon us as if we are a great experiment. I for one prefer to have a leader who gives us strength, hope and unity, one who WANTS US TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A COUNTRY.
It should be disallowed, perhaps, but it is not.
That is to say, the well documented doctrine of taqiyyah now practiced freely by both major sects of Islam (though in differing interpretations) fully justifies any use of deception as regards to one’s true faith if the intention of that deception is to promote the spread of Islam, whether by conversion under false pretenses or by strategic advantage leading to conquests.
Since Obama might not have become President if his true allegiance to Islam were better known, and by becoming President he has enormously damaged the resistance of the America and the rest of the Western world to Islamicization, his actions in overtly denying his Muslim background (but only to infidels, never to Muslim audiences) is fully justified under even the strictest possible interpretations of any Islamic doctrines concerning keeping the faith.
This might seem offensive or at least confusing to Christians (which is, I believe, at least part of the point of the entire idea of taqiyyah), but it is not particularly difficult for most other people to understand, whether or not they approve.
HE IS NOT A MUSLIM, PEOPLE! GET THE F*CK OVER IT!
Anyone who doubts the divinity of Christ is definitively not a christian.