President Barack Obama is not, like former FBI agent G. Gary DiLaura says, a Muslim.
However despite that fact, DiLaura is not alone in his opinion.
According to various polls such as one conducted by the Pew Research Center, as many as one in seven Americans (including one-third of conservative Republicans) label Obama as a Muslim.
Then there's the conspiracy theory that Obama is an elaborately planted Muslim terrorist deliberately plotting the imminent destruction of the U. S. republic.
Of this, my view is that this is preposterous.
It may very well be that Obama's socialist agenda is ruining the Republic, but in this he is not alone. There are many Liberal Democrats who support the ever increasing welfare/police/tax and spend state.
These are all not Muslims
In any event, here are my reasons to support the contention that Obama is a hybrid - and maybe of the best kind - some Christian, some Muslim, and a lot of neither one.
Obama took his oath of office for the U.S. presidency and the U. S. Senate on the Bible, not the Koran. He could be a secret Muslim since the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya allows Muslims to deny they are Muslim if it would be dangerous not to.
According to the president's memoirs and biographies, Obama was raised by his mother and her Christian parents. His father Barack Obama, Sr., with whom he lived as a baby, was Muslim and his stepfather Lolo Soetoro with whom he lived during his early childhood was a Muslim.
Obama has a Muslim middle name, Hussein, which references Husayn, the grandson of Muhammad.
During most of the years he lived in Indonesia as a child (1967–1971) Obama attended the Roman Catholic St. Francis Assisi School, where classes began and ended each day with Christian prayers. But he was registered in the school as a Muslim.
Obama has said he became a Christian when he was in his 20s, while working as a community organizer in Chicago.
"I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany," he said in a 2006 speech. "…. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."
Usually secret Muslims don’t spend 20 years sitting in Christian churches. But then again, in the book "Obama, Renegade," his friends say" he actually really wasn't much of a churchgoer."
Still Obama always campaigned as a Christian.
"Along his Senate campaign trail (in 2004), Obama would never fail to carry his Christian Bible. He would place it right beside him, in the small compartment in the passenger side door of the SUV, so he could refer to it often," reported journalist David Mendell in his 2007 biography Obama: From Promise to Power.
While campaigning for president in 2008, Obama also claimed to be a Christian:
"I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful."
In office, Obama has occasionally attended churches in the D.C. area, including the Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, and St. John's Episcopal Church.
Of course, what politicians claim while campaigning for an election, and what the truth is, are sometimes two different things.
Still, if Obama is secretly a Muslim, he is overtly killing Muslims. He was directly involved in the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. His foreign policy has killed al-Qaeda members, all the way down to low-level militants. His drone strikes target terrorists across the globe, taking out hundreds of civilians, who usually happen to be Muslims.
Obama has said, "I have never practiced Islam. I am respectful of the religion, but it's not my own."
But if he never practiced Islam, he respects what is good in Islam.
Obama said, "The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country - I know, because I am one of them."
Obama has said that "Islam can be compatible with the modern world" and that the Muslim call to prayer is "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset," and recited with an Arabic accent the opening lines: "Allah is Supreme! ... I witness that there is no god but Allah ...."
Obama stated that the Autobiography of Malcolm X inspired him in his youth.
Obama raised nearly $1 million and campaigned for a Kenyan presidential candidate who had a written agreement with Muslim leaders promising to convert Kenya to an Islamic state that bans Christianity.
Obama is mentioned as helping to organize the 1995 Million Man March led by Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam.
Obama visited "more than one mosque" in Kenya while on a political trip there.
Obama later stated, "We have to change our behavior in showing the Muslim world greater respect."
On Sept. 25, 2012, in his address to United Nations General Assembly, Obama said that "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."
At the G-20 summit in April 2009, Obama bowed deeply to Saudi King Abdullah, a Muslim who is also the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Never before has a president displayed such deference to a foreign official. Obama has not bowed to other royal leaders. Obama met with Queen Elizabeth but he did not bow when he shook her hand.
Obama's spiritual mentor of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explained in an interview "that Barack Obama was steeped in Islam when he first met him," and said he “made it comfortable” for Obama to accept Christianity without having to renounce his Islamic background.
But, Obama abruptly left his radical Christian church in Chicago in 2008, when it became politically controversial, without finding another church to join.
How faithful Obama is to Christian dogma is also in question.
Which might only means he thinks for himself.
In prepared remarks in April 2012, Obama referred to Jesus as "a" Son of God rather than as "the" Son of God.
Obama has criticized passages of the Bible.
"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?”
Obama required that a religiously affiliated college take the extraordinary action of concealing with wood the monogram “IHS”, which represents the name of Jesus, during a speech by Obama there.
In 2006, Obama gave an irreverent speech about using the Bible in public policy. It resembled a stand-up comedy act, with Obama making fun of the books of the Torah, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and other key Biblical passages.
"I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people."
And Obama seems to depart from both religions when he advances gay rights and abortion rights.
And he departs clearly from Islam when he advocates women's equality.
Obama, baptized into the United Church of Christ, formally joined it in 1988. He left the UCC in 2008 because of the Rev. Wright controversy. He has not become a formal member of any church since 2008.
"I'm a Christian by choice," he said. "My family didn't—frankly they weren't folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church."
Isn't that about what Obama himself is - a spiritual man in the toughest of places to be one - politics. That isn't Islam; it is Christianity, it isn't agnosticism and free thinking. It is a admixture of all of the above.
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