7 thoughts on “Obama, Muslim? Oh Yeah, According to Daniel Pipes – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. It is Pipes, rather than any Muslims we know of, who has declared in his article that “Obama’s conversion to another faith, in short, makes him a murtadd [apostate],” and it’s Pipes again who has raised the issue of whether or not he deserves to be killed for his apostasy. (To his credit, Pipes quotes that eminent authority on Islamic law, Robert Spencer, that a childhood apostasy is less severe than an adult one). If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee for President, perhaps a visit to Dr. Pipes from the Secret Service would be in order, since he’s the one raising the question of whether Mr. Obama deserves death at the hands of radicals. Move over, Ayatollah Khomeini!

    In fact, being registered as a Muslim in an Indonesian school is like being registered in the tribal rolls as a member of the Navajo nation in the United States. It’s an administrative category that says nothing about a person’s beliefs or religious practice (there are Cherokees who follow their “traditional” religious practices, but also Cherokees who are Mormon and Roman Catholic). By itself, it is nothing but a matter of descent and family status.

    The most interesting thing about this episode, aside from its resemblance to the bewildering kerfuffle of the 1990s about whether Episcopalian Secretary of State Madelaine Albright was “really” Jewish, is the attitude of Pipes and his fellow travelers, whose judgments on current events are informed almost single-mindedly by a faux-Islamist perspective of their own construction. They’ve bought so completely into the “reality” of the fringe Islamist ideologues with whom they’re so obsessed, that they have begun to assume that it defines real life in the world at large.

    Sigmund Freud (was he an atheist or a Jew, Dr. Pipes?) wrote in 1910 that “We humans. . .find reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of fantasy in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality by the production of wish-fulfilments. . . .The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful fantasies into reality. Where this fails. . .he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of fantasy. . . .[But] if a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift. . .he can transform his fantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms. In this manner he can escape the doom of neurosis and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality.” It would have been better for us all, perhaps, had Messrs. Pipes, Spencer, and Horowitz not possessed both the gifts of gab and the technologies that have allowed them to fill the ether with the second-hand fundamentalism they seem so intent on spreading as a way of dealing with their own personal demons.

  2. Christian Obama’s as Muslim as my Lutheran wife is. After two drinks she claimed to be Jewish by injection. More laughs than Pipes got.

  3. Excuse me? Daniel Pipes is not some backwoods yeehaa running his mouth. He is an EXPERT on Islamism and well educated. He is not a predjudiced man but you Obamabots just don’t get it. Go and read his books and see for yourself. What he says is true. Obama has nothing going for him but a silver tongue. And if he was a Muslim and converted to Christianity I wonder what would happen to him in a predominantly Muslim country. They kill them, don’t they? People who leave the Muslim religion? I believe they want to get one of their own in charge of our country. If he wins, you will be sorry. He will ruin what is left of the country. Better check out McCain. We know him. Where did Obama come from and what has he done for his community other than go to Hawaii at voting time and make nice speaches about “Change.”?

  4. @Barb: Daniel Pipes is as much an “expert” on Islam as David Horowitz is an expert on Islamofascism. He earned his doctorate long ago. He hasn’t published academically in ages. Doesn’t have a tenure track position. He’s a propagandist, period.

    Barb is one of the true believers who’s drunk the Kool-Aid. Aren’t you slumming a bit though, Barb over here on the left side of the blogosphere? Aren’t you afraid you might be contaminated by something–like perhaps wisdom? I guess there isn’t much danger of that happening.

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