Thread: Can a past of Islam change the path to president for Obama?

http://link.toolbot.com/examiner.com/58467

Can a past of Islam change the path to president for Obama?

WASHINGTON - Although Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, his childhood and family connections to Islam are beginning to complicate his presidential ambitions.


The Illinois Democrat spent much of last week refuting unfounded reports that he had been educated in a madrassa, or radical Islamic school, when he lived in Indonesia as a boy.

“The Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa,” said a statement put out by the senator’s staff.

But the school did teach the Quran, Islam’s holy book, along with subjects such as math and science, according to Obama, who attended when he was 9 and 10.

“In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school,” he wrote in his first memoir, “Dreams from my Father.” “The teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.”

Obama — whose father, stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims — explained his own first name, Barack, in “Dreams”: “It means ‘Blessed.’ In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim.”

In his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama added: “Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist.”

Still, when his father, a black Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, “the family wanted a Muslim burial,” Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as saying in “Dreams.”

The statement put out by Obama’s office last week referred to his father simply as “an atheist,” without mentioning his Muslim upbringing.

But with pundits already making faith a major issue in this presidential campaign — as evidenced by questions about Republican Mitt Romney’s Mormonism — Obama’s religious background is likely to come under further scrutiny.

“He comes from a father who was a Muslim,” said civil rights author Juan Williams of National Public Radio. “I mean, I think that given we’re at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem.”

Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, for whom the senator was given his middle name, Hussein, was fiercely devoted to Islam, according to an account in “Dreams.” The grandfather, who died in 1979, was described by his widow when Obama visited Kenya in the late 1980s.

“What your grandfather respected was strength. Discipline,” Obama quoted his grandmother as telling him. “This is also why he rejected the Christian religion, I think.

“For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man’s sins.

“To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort women,” she added. “And so he converted to Islam — he thought its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs.”

When Obama was 2 years old, his parents divorced and his father moved away from the family’s home in Hawaii. Four years later, his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, who moved his new wife and stepson to Jakarta.

“During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school,” Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf.”

Obama’s stepfather was a practicing Muslim.

“Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths,” Obama recalled. “He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

“It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction,” Obama recalled. “He introduced me as his son.”

Although Obama wrote of “puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer,” he was not raised as a Muslim, according to the senator’s office. Nor was he raised as a Christian by his mother, a white American named Ann Dunham who was deeply skeptical of religion.

“Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones,” Obama wrote. “For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.”

As a result, he said, “I was not raised in a religious household.”

Later in life, however, he was drawn to the writings of an influential American Muslim who served as the spokesman for the militant Nation of Islam.

“Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different,” Obama wrote. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

He added: “Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation.”

While working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, Obama was repeatedly asked to join Christian congregations, but begged off.

“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote.

But after much soul searching, he eventually was baptized at Trinity United Church of Christ.

“It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear,” he explained. “But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”

Obama’s family connections to Islam would endure, however. For example, his brother Roy opted for Islam over Christianity, as Obama recounted when describing his 1992 wedding.

“The person who made me proudest of all,” Obama wrote, “was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol.”

Meanwhile, Obama remained sharply critical of what he called “the religious absolutism of the Christian right.”

In “Audacity,” the senator wrote that such believers insist “not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

As for the Democratic Party, Obama observed that “a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears — rightly, no doubt — that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices.”

Although the overwhelming majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, Obama does not believe that any one religion should define the United States.

“We are no longer just a Christian nation,” he argues in “Audacity,” which was published last year. “We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

Obama calls the Iraq war “a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country.” He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S.

“In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans … have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging,” he laments. “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

Sen. Barack Hussein Obama

» Born: Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham.

» Education: Graduated from Columbia University in 1983; graduated in 1991 from Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

» Family: He and wife, Michelle, were married in 1992. They have two daughters: Malia, 8, and Sasha, 4.

» Residence: Chicago’s South Side

» Political career: Served seven years in the Illinois state Senate; sworn in as U.S. senator in January 2005. Serves on the Environment and Public Works Committee, the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee.

NO

If he was truly 'converted' he would have been beheaded by now, anyway. That is the islamic law.

Also, he's a SNEAK. He tried to hide it from the American people.
Sound familiar? He's attempted to hide quite a bit from the public. Piss poor PR people he has.

Anyone who pocesses a characteristic of deception should never be allowed to step foot into Congress {don't say it guys, lol} let alone the White House.

my 2 cents

I'll second that, 2ndamendsis!!

BTW
does this mean for those dipwads who discriminate against AMERICANS while driving taxis?

Obama calls the Iraq war “a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country.” He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S.

Hey NEESE? This is some specimen!
civil rights for MUSLIMS, many who are sending money back home to have us blown up. Yup, day after day they are locating these "immigrants" who wouldn't follow American Law for love nor money but prefer to help 'allah's cause.'

That's the ticket, obamama.........civil rights for ONE GROUP OF AMERICANS but what the hell........you don't have to concern yourself with any other good AMERICANS.
DO YOU?

Somebody needs to tell Obama that we are a Christian Nation. We are kind enough to allow people into our country if they are happy with the way things are, but we have no intention of changing. Barack seems influenced by his family, how could Islam not affected him? I have a lot of concern that Oprah is backing this guy. She has a lot of pull with her Oprah zombies.

Obama — whose father, stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims

Sins of the father do not make the son guilty but only a fool would ignore this...

I would hope NO Muslim could become President! But sometimes I wonder how foolish people are when we look at some of the people in office. Here's a related blog post:

http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archi...al_reason.html

January 26, 2007
The Real Reason Obama is Hiding Muslim Background

By Debbie Schlussel

Why is Barack Hussein Obama running, hiding, concealing, and denying when it comes to his Muslim background?

Various polls on Presidential elections indicate that he'd lose more than half the American people off the bat. Why can't he openly admit his background--that he was a Muslim at one time in his life, even though he claims to be a Christian now?

Various polls show us the answer.

Gallup, Pew, the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg and FOX News frequently do polls on the one thing--the one bugaboo--that would keep the average American from voting for a Presidential candidate, even if the candidate was ideal in every other category.
islamiccrescent.jpgbarackobama.jpg

Americans are not stupid. They see the way Muslims around the world--and in America, too--act in the name of their religion. And more than half of them won't vote for a Muslim for President.

In June, a nationwide LA Times/Bloomberg poll showed these results:

Would Not Vote for a Presidential Candidate who is

Mormon--37%
Jew--15%
Evangelical Christian-21%
Muslim--54%
Catholic--10%

A December FOX News Poll shows these results:

Less likely to vote for a presidential candidate if the candidate is:

A Protestant--6%
Roman Catholic--10%
Jewish--10%
A Member of the Christian Coalition--24%
A Mormon--32%
A Muslim--45%
An Athiest--50%
A Scientologist--53%

In 2004, a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey found that 38% of Americans would not vote for a Muslim for President.

Here are the numbers from Gallup in 1999:

Percentage of Americans who won't vote for a Presidential candidate who is . . .

Catholic: 4% (1937: 30%)
Black: 5% (1958: 63%, 1987: 21%)
Jewish: 6% (1937: 47%)
Baptist: 6%
Woman: 8%
Mormon: 17%
Muslim: 38%
Gay: 37% (1978: 74%)
Atheist: 48%

The proof is in the numbers. A Muslim candidate cannot become President at this point in time. And Barack Hussein Obama does not want Americans to know that, at the very least, at one point in his life, he was a Muslim. And is still very sypathetic to their viewpoint.

Americans would be wise to understand that in islam, NO LAW supercedes muslim law.......allah's law.

The Constitution is invalid to a muslim. It is null and void.

islam has NO place for democracy in any form. That is the islamic LAW.

Want a muslim in ANY elected office? An oath to uphold the Constitution is a NON oath......invalid. Every decision made would be made according to islamic law.

This isn't about religion, it's about the Rule of Law, which 'law' would be valid, the Constitution and the oath to protect and serve the Constitution.

Originally Posted by Neese

http://link.toolbot.com/examiner.com/58467

Can a past of Islam

change the path

to president for Obama?

WHEN HE WAS 10 YEARS OLD? WE HAVE AN EVANGELICAL NOW IN THE WHITE HOUSE AND I COULD SAY A LOT ABOUT THEM LIKE KKK, ETC, THAT USE THE BIBLE TO HATE ANYONE THAT IS DIFFERENT THEN THEM.

WASHINGTON - Although Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, his childhood and family connections to Islam are beginning to complicate his presidential ambitions.

I AM MORE INCLINED TO HOLD IT AGAINST HIM THAT HE IS A CHRISTIAN THAN HIS MUSLIM BACKGROUND

The Illinois Democrat spent much of last week refuting unfounded reports that he had been educated in a madrassa, or radical Islamic school, when he lived in Indonesia as a boy.

“The Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa,” said a statement put out by the senator’s staff.

But the school did teach the Quran, Islam’s holy book, along with subjects such as math and science, according to Obama, who attended when he was 9 and 10.

THERRE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE KORAN OR THE BIBLE EXCEPT HOW IT IS INTERPRETED.
I HAVE SPENT MANY YEARS STUDING THE KORAN AND ISLAM. WHAT DOES THAT MAKE ME? NOW I AM A NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIAN AND MY BELIEFS ARE NOT MAINSTREAM CHRISTIAN.

“In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school,” he wrote in his first memoir, “Dreams from my Father.” “The teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.”

Obama — whose father, stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims — explained his own first name, Barack, in “Dreams”: “It means ‘Blessed.’ In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim.”

ARE WE GOING TO JUDGE HIM BY WHAT IS FAMILY, WHOM HE DID NOT KNOW, IS?

In his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama added: “Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist.”

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO HOLD AGAINST HIM, THAT HIS FATHER WAS A MUSLIM OR THAT HE WAS A ATHEIST?

Still, when his father, a black Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, “the family wanted a Muslim burial,” Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as saying in “Dreams.”

The statement put out by Obama’s office last week referred to his father simply as “an atheist,” without mentioning his Muslim upbringing.

WE ALL KNEW HIS MUSLIM BACKGROUNG.

But with pundits already making faith a major issue in this presidential campaign — as evidenced by questions about Republican Mitt Romney’s Mormonism — Obama’s religious background is likely to come under further scrutiny.

I WENT TO A CATHOLIC SCHOOL UNTIL I WAS TEN AND REMEMBER LITTLE OF IT.

“He comes from a father who was a Muslim,” said civil rights author Juan Williams of National Public Radio. “I mean, I think that given we’re at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem.”

THIS IS COMPLETE RASICT. WE ARE NOT A WAR WITH MUSLIMS, BUT MUSLIM EXTERMISTS WHO ARE A SMALL MINORITY OF MUSLIMS.

Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, for whom the senator was given his middle name, Hussein, was fiercely devoted to Islam, according to an account in “Dreams.” The grandfather, who died in 1979, was described by his widow when Obama visited Kenya in the late 1980s.

HUSSEIN IS AS COMMON AS JOHN, BILL OR JOE.

“What your grandfather respected was strength. Discipline,” Obama quoted his grandmother as telling him. “This is also why he rejected the Christian religion, I think.

“For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man’s sins.

“To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort women,” she added. “And so he converted to Islam — he thought its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs.”

When Obama was 2 years old, his parents divorced and his father moved away from the family’s home in Hawaii. Four years later, his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, who moved his new wife and stepson to Jakarta.

“During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school,” Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf.”

Obama’s stepfather was a practicing Muslim.

“Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths,” Obama recalled. “He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

“It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction,” Obama recalled. “He introduced me as his son.”

Although Obama wrote of “puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer,” he was not raised as a Muslim, according to the senator’s office. Nor was he raised as a Christian by his mother, a white American named Ann Dunham who was deeply skeptical of religion.

“Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones,” Obama wrote. “For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.”
As a result, he said, “I was not raised in a religious household.”Later in life, however, he was drawn to the writings of an influential American Muslim who served as the spokesman for the militant Nation of Islam.

“Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different,” Obama wrote. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

He added: “Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation.”

While working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, Obama was repeatedly asked to join Christian congregations, but begged off.

“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote.

But after much soul searching, he eventually was baptized at Trinity United Church of Christ.

THIS IS WHAT WORRY ME MOST.

“It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear,” he explained. “But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”

Obama’s family connections to Islam would endure, however. For example, his brother Roy opted for Islam over Christianity, as Obama recounted when describing his 1992 wedding.

“The person who made me proudest of all,” Obama wrote, “was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol.”

Meanwhile, Obama remained sharply critical of what he called “the religious absolutism of the Christian right.”

In “Audacity,” the senator wrote that such believers insist “not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

As for the Democratic Party, Obama observed that “a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears — rightly, no doubt — that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices.”

Although the overwhelming majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, Obama does not believe that any one religion should define the United States.

“We are no longer just a Christian nation,” he argues in “Audacity,” which was published last year. “We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

Obama calls the Iraq war “a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country.” He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S.

“In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans … have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging,” he laments. “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

Sen. Barack Hussein Obama

» Born: Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham.

» Education: Graduated from Columbia University in 1983; graduated in 1991 from Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

» Family: He and wife, Michelle, were married in 1992. They have two daughters: Malia, 8, and Sasha, 4.

» Residence: Chicago’s South Side

» Political career: Served seven years in the Illinois state Senate; sworn in as U.S. senator in January 2005. Serves on the Environment and Public Works Committee, the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee.

I WOULD BE WORRIED MORE OF WHAT INFLUENCE HIS MOTHER HAD ON HIM THAN HIS FATHER BEING A MUSLIM. MUSLIM OR CHRISTIAN, HOW MUCH DOES IT REALLY MATTER. JESUS WAS BORN A JEW AND WAS HATE BECAUSE OF IT, BUT HE WAS ALSO THE SON OF GOD.

Radical muslim or radical christian, they both should worry you.