So some guy gets up at a New Hampshire Q&A and asks this of Donald Trump: “We have a problem in this country called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”
To which Trump replies, laughing: “We need this question?”
The man plows ahead, saying: “But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”
Trump again: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things, and you know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening and we’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”
Then… the deluge. OMG! Trump doesn’t stand up to some nitwit who says the President is a Muslim!
Stop. Stop stop Stop!!!!!!
Let me be blunt here.
President Obama says he is a Christian, and I totally accept this. Yes, yes, I know why the “Obama is a Muslim” business has such a hold on some people. When one explores the question of what makes a Muslim one repeatedly comes across the presentation that a child born of a Muslim father is a Muslim. The site Islam Question and Answer under the “General Supervision” of one “Shayk Muhammad Saalith al-Munajjid” says the following:
It says in al-Mawsoo’ah al-Fiqhiyyah al-Kuwaitiyyah (4/270): The fuqaha’ are unanimously agreed that if the father becomes Muslim and he has young children, then these children are to be regarded as Muslim, following their father.
Barack Obama Sr. was, at a minimum, raised in a Muslim family. President Obama has freely admitted that his grandfather was a Muslim. The child of his grandfather was his father, born of a Muslim. Ergo, there is nothing conspiratorial or bizarre in suggesting that the son and grandson of a Muslim faith that says children born to a Muslim father are automatically considered to be a Muslim is a Muslim. What’s the big deal?
The rub here is that the President has long professed himself to be a Christian. I decidedly take him at his word. Rule One in life and politics: Never question someone else’s faith. (As Ben Carson ruefully learned when questioning Donald Trump’s.)
But the irony is that this “Obama is a Christian” business really backfires on those going after Trump. Why?
Talk about a massive double-standard!
As it happens, I know something about the President’s Christianity because he belongs to the United Church of Christ. And I know a lot about the UCC because, yes, I am a member as well as having served as president of my local church council and a board member for our regional UCC, a board that cares for over 200 UCC churches here in Central Pennsylvania.
Because of this I know exactly that the theology of our faith is that the members run the church. We are the boss. If you will, we are a congregation of Popes. The minister reports to the members — through the Council. Any member at any time can move to fire a pastor if they believe this is necessary.
Thus understood? At no time in the 20 years that Barack Obama belonged to the Trinity United Church of Christ did Obama move to fire Jeremiah Wright for his rampant anti-Semitism and anti-American sermons. Zero.
Lest there be any doubt about Rev. Wright’s views on Jews, here is a sample copied verbatim from the Anti-Defamation League:
Jeremiah Wright: Messenger of Intolerance
[…]
In His Own Words“Them Jews aren’t gonna let [Obama] talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office.”
“The Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote that’s controlling him that would not let him send a representation to the Darfur [Durban] review conference that’s talking this craziness because the Zionists, they will not let him talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is. Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza. The ethnic cleansing of the Zionists is a sin and a crime against humanity.They don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel.”
An interview with Newport News, VA-based
newspaper The Daily Press June 9, 2009“Part of the fight going on now in terms of the religious arguments and tension and polarization and hatred among the fundamentalists especially in each of the major world religions has to do with the political [rather than religious], especially as it pertains to the political decision made in 1948 to solve a European problem of European Jews by putting them in somebody else’s country.”
From a lecture at Michigan State University,
February 7, 2008“We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against them as being anti-Semitic.”
From a sermon at Howard University in
Washington, D.C., January 15, 2006“The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism. The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month’s General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism.”
From Wright’s Pastor’s Page message
Trumpet Newsmagazine, July 2005“Last year’s conference in Africa on racism, which the United States would not participate in, because somebody dared to point the racism which still supports both here and in Israel. I said that dirty word again. Every time you say Israel, Negros get awfully quiet on you, ’cause they scared. Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared. You don’t see the connection between 9-1-1-0-1 and the Israeli-Palestinian? Something wrong, you wanna borrow my glasses?”
From a sermon, September 1, 2002“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye…We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done oversees is now brought right back into our own front yards. Americans chickens are coming home to roost.'”
From a sermon, September 16, 2001
So the message here is..what? The message is that Donald Trump is responsible for some guy in New Hampshire saying the President is a Muslim (and when you hear the question the questioner was really asking about “training camps” — without specifying whether he was talking about ISIS-style camps in the Middle East or those camps set up by Muslims in the U.S., like the one in Islamburg (aka Hancock), New York.
But Barack Obama had no responsibility — zero — when in fact he could have directly and personally acted — for the conduct of his own minister’s anti-Semitism.
The liberal double standard becomes a chasm.
In a word?
Baloney.