That frisky Danny Pipes is up to his usual shenanigans. This time he’s managed to deliver the goods about Barack Obama’s Muslim upbringing. Say what? You didn’t know Obama was a Muslim? Well neither did anyone else in the world except David Horowitz, Danny and Charles Johnson. But boy are they gonna let you know about what they know. This nonsense is from, where else, Frontpagemagazine:
Available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father.
How is Obama Muslim? Well, first his biological father was from Kenya. His father was born a Muslim (though he never practiced as one during Obama’s lifetime). And Obama’s Indonesian step-father supposedly inculcated him in the ways of Islam. There’s only a few problems with all this (as there is with everything Danny Boy writes) as Media Matters points out. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was far from a devout Muslim. The Chicago Tribune notes:
Soetoro, who died in 1987, was hardly the image of a pious Muslim, friends and family members say.
His nephew, Sonny Trisulo, 49, said Soetoro always liked women and alcohol. One of his health problems was a failing liver. “He loved drinking, was a smart and warm person, the naughtiest one in the family,” Trisulo recalled.
I’m sure Lolo deeply initiated young Barry into the ways of Islam.
There is, of course, a “serious” reason why Pipes is concerned about whether Obama was ever a Muslim. If he ever was and left Islam, then the jihadists could justify taking his life. And no American would want to elect a president who would be the target of Al Qaeda, now would they?
[If Obama was] ever a Muslim or seen by others as a Muslim” — [or m]ore precisely, might Muslims consider him a ‘murtadd’ (apostate), that is, a Muslim who converted to another religion and, therefore someone whose blood may be shed.”
All of this is of course meretricious nonsense. But it takes on significance in light of the presidential campaign in a way that Ben Smith of Politico captured well:
Keep an eye on this one, because if Obama’s the nominee, this FrontPagemagazine piece by the conservative writer Daniel Pipes is likely to be the template for a faux-legitimate assault on Obama’s religion. But the political impact of the piece isn’t the tortured argument. It’s branding Obama a Muslim, by a subtler means.
That is precisely why this is important. Pipes is the slimy initiator of the whispering campaign against Obama. You don’t have to really prove he was Muslim. All you have to do is insinuate the idea into the minds of enough people and it will take on a life of its own. This is Swift Boating by another means.
Keep in mind of course where ol’ Danny Boy finds his current political home–right by Rudy Giuliani’s side (though the campaign denies Pipes an “official” role). You don’t think that’s an accident do you? Rudy is prepared to fight dirty in this one if he gets the nomination. And he wants everyone to know he’s prepared to use the slimiest he can find to douse his opponent with pond scum. And Daniel Pipes is certainly slimy. He’s a Jewish version of James Carville, but worse. At least Carville understood that it’s all a political game played on behalf of a good cause. Pipes is a true believer, the kind who centuries ago inspired people to go on Crusades to fight the infidel to the death. That’s the kind of person Rudy Giuliani is turning to to win the presidency. God help us all if he does.
I wanted to be clear on this. We’re you insinuating that Daniel Pipes is similar to pond scum? If so, I believe you owe pond scum everywhere an apology.
I called him “slime” but “pond scum” will do quite nicely.
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.
Maybe Pipes ought to investigate the Shriners, see if they too are secret Muslims.
Zhu Bajie
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.
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.”?
@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.