Not Guilty
Vol: 107 Issue: 20 Friday, August 20, 2010
Among the more or less ‘stock’ phrases in American Christian circles is the rhetorical question; “if you were arrested tomorrow and charged with being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to warrant a conviction?”
That question is designed, of course, to call attention to one’s personal witness for Christ. To a Christian, that is a pretty sobering thought. What if nobody could tell?
What if the ‘prosecution’ could call witness after witness against you, and still couldn’t mount a convincing enough case to convince a jury.
I mean, think about it. What if you went around telling everybody you were a Christian, but nobody believed you? Who would you blame? Everybody else for being so judgmental? If that is your answer, then it should come as no surprise if you were acquitted.
During the campaign, Barack Obama didn’t simply declare himself a Christian, he banned the use of his Muslim name, ‘Hussein’ on pain of being declared either a ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobe’.
He dispatched his minions to testify as to Obama’s Christianity. He gave his testimony that Reverend Jeremiah Wright led him to Christ.
He made a point of saying he had been a faithful church member for twenty years (until he ‘discovered’ that whenever he missed church, Wright would launch into an anti-American, anti-Christian pro-Islamic attack).
Whenever possible thereafter, the president made a point of either telling people he was a Christian or, even better, sending out other people to tell people that he was a Christian.
White House spokesman Bill Burton said from aboard Air Force One enroute to Martha’s Vineyard that “The president is obviously a Christian. He prays every day.”
What prompted Burton to make that observation was the release of a poll that mirrored the old rhetorical questions about there being enough independent evidence of one’s Christianity to merit conviction.
A Pew Research poll conducted before the Ground Zero Mosque controversy erupted asked Americans about Obama’s religion. After observing him for the past 18 months while in office, one in five Americans believe Obama is really a Muslim.
In a separate poll conducted by Time Magazine after Obama weighed in with his expression of support for the Ground Zero Mosque, that number jumps to one in four.
In neither poll did a majority of Americans say they believed Obama is a Christian. There just wasn’t enough evidence to convict him of the charge.
Pew analysts blame it on attacks by Obama’s opponents. (Oh, and Obama’s ‘limited’ church attendance.)
Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Center’s director, said the confusion partly reflects “the intensification of negative views about Obama among his critics.”
Alan Cooperman, the Pew Forum’s associate director for research, said that with the public hearing little about Obama’s religion, “maybe there’s more possibility for other people to make suggestions that the president is this or he’s really that or he’s really a Muslim.”
Or maybe they are just listening to Obama and making up their own minds based on the evidence available? What is interesting is how the numbers have changed since Obama was first elected.
After having watched him in office for the past eighteen months, the number of Americans that say they believe Obama is a Muslim has upticked by ten percent. Among blacks, fewer than 43% believe Obama is really a Christian.
Even among Democrats (to whom Christianity is more mysterious) only 46% are buying into Obama the Christian. It is interesting to note that the New York Times and the Associate Press both interpreted the results of the polls and found rampant racism everywhere.
They noted that six in ten of those that say Obama is a Muslim say so based on information they got from the media. I found that particularly interesting given the extraordinary effort put forth by the mainstream media to dispel rumors that Obama is a Muslim.
What I found particularly interesting in the poll was a little tidbit that nobody else apparently did. Of those that doubt that Obama is a Christian, eleven percent say that they learned it from watching and listening to Obama himself.
Assessment:
I don’t really think that the big story is whether or not Obama is a Christian or a Muslim. The mere fact that anybody has to ask suggests that in his heart, he is probably neither.
The question of whether there would be sufficient evidence to convict Obama of being a Christian in some hypothetical court has been asked and answered in the very real court of public opinion and Obama has been found ‘not guilty’ by a majority of the public.
As to the question of whether or not Obama is really a Muslim, I don’t know. But I think that if that question were put to a Muslim court of public opinion, the verdict would be the same.
There would not be enough evidence to convict.
What is really at issue isn’t whether or not Obama is a Christian or a Muslim. What is at issue here is that it is an issue at all.
If Islam really is tolerant and peaceful and if the jihadists really are just a tiny percentage of radicals and not representative of Islam, then who cares if Obama is a Muslim? Why would it bother the White House if people thought he was?
If Obama cares because he’s really a Christian and is proud of his Christianity, then why would he and his supporters feel it necessary to constantly point it out? Shouldn’t it be obvious?
George Bush’s confession of Jesus Christ was never in doubt insofar as the mainstream media was concerned. Nobody needed to issue reminders that the President is a Christian back then.
Indeed, when George Bush was president, his overt Christianity was perceived as a liability.
It would matter little to the public if Barack Obama were a Catholic or a Protestant or even if he made no claim to faith at all. What seems to matter is the possibility that he is a Muslim.
And this is that place where we have to split off from reality and enter into the crazy world of political correctness where nothing is as it is and everything is as we’d like it to be.
In the theoretic Politically Correct world, Islam is one of the world’s three great monotheistic faiths, along with Christianity and Judaism. Islam is a religion based in peace and love and tolerance and respect for other religions and the jihadists are cultists that have perverted Islam.
In the real world, there is no evidence to support it. There are no pluralistic Islamic societies. Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam, is hardly a bastion of tolerance. It is a capital offense to convert from Islam to another religion.
In Iran and Afghanistan, women accused of adultery are routinely buried in the ground from the waste down while jeering crowds throw giant rocks at their heads and upper bodies until they finally battered to death.
One waits in vain for the Islamic charities to show up and provide relief for the victims of the Pakistani flooding. Islamic charities build moseques in New York City. They fund flotillas aimed at breaking through Israelis blockages. They provide survivor’s benefits to the families of suicide bombers.
They don’t provide relief to victims of natural disasters.
The vast majority of funding for the U.N.-led relief operation so far has come from traditional donors — principally the United States, Australia, Denmark and Britain. Many of Pakistan’s regional allies and neighbors, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as other developing countries, have sent only a trickle of aid in the crucial first weeks of the crisis. . .
The lack of assistance from Pakistan’s allies in the Islamic world has been a source of frustration among the country’s officials.
State media in Saudi Arabia reported Tuesday that the country had raised $20.5 million to support the Pakistani flood victims. But that was the kingdom’s first significant donation, and it came three weeks into the crisis. Pakistan considers Saudi Arabia one of its closest allies, and the Saudis have in the past lavished money on charities and religious organizations in Pakistan.
This isn’t intended as a polemic against Islam. It is an observation about political correctness.
The White House is bending over backwards in its effort to dispel the rumor that the president shares the faith of millions of others in a of religion of peace, love and tolerance dedicated to making the world a better place.
At the same time, Obama’s public relations teams are out in force making the case that Obama really shares the faith of the xenophobic rednecks “clinging to God and guns and having antipathy for those that aren’t like them”.
They are making their case despite the fact that ‘everybody knows’ that Christians are intolerant of gays, single-parent families, abortion ‘rights’ women’s rights, etc., etc. and so on and so forth. That’s the politically correct view.
Political correctness can be identified in much the same way that one can identify the nudist at the costume party. Nobody wants to be rude so everybody pretends its just another costume.
For example, Finland was recently voted the most desirable country in the world in which to live. That’s PC. Finland is open, tolerant, has a generous social safety net, and above all, a bastion of political correctness.
So all the rest of the countries came together and voted Finland their favorite country to live in.
One thing Finland doesn’t have is a problem with illegal immigration. In the real world, that problem would belong to what is actually the most desireable country in the world in which to live. Nobody is trying to batter down the fences to break into Finland. Finland doesn’t even need to put up a fence.
That’s the difference between PC and reality. In the PC world, Islam is great and Christianity is intolerant and reactionary.
In reality, the mere suggestion that Obama is really a Muslim is an insult requiring an immediate response from the mainstream media, which sprang into action to defend his Christianity.
Cynthia Tucker at the Atlanta Journal Constitution made her best case by reminding us of Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
See? And you didn’t think there was any evidence!
Omegaletter 