When Is a Muslim Not a Muslim?

August 20, 2010, 6:38 pm
When Is a Muslim Not a Muslim?
By TOBIN HARSHAW
"The Opinionator"
The New York Times

The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.

Do you think Barack Obama is a Muslim? According to the Pew Center, many Americans do. According to Politico’s Josh Gerstein, Time magazine’s pollsters found that a majority of Republicans do. But here’s another question: How many of the Americans who say they think Barack Obama is a Muslim actually believe that he is one? That’s not as obtuse a query as it might appear, as some of the blogosphere’s better minds have argued in recent days.

But before we get to that far remove, let’s look at the raw poll data. The Pew survey, which was taken before the president’s seeming endorsement of the mosque near ground zero last Friday and subsequent backpedaling last weekend, found that “nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is.”

Time’s poll dealt with Islam more broadly:

Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President — a slightly higher percentage than the 24% who mistakenly believe the current occupant of the Oval Office is himself a Muslim. In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim.

The news led the whole gang at NBC News’s First Read to climb on the same high horse: “These results don’t many anyone look good — Obama’s political opponents (who have helped spread false information about the president’s religion and birthplace), the press (which obviously hasn’t done its job here, thanks to some outlets even serving as a megaphone by running false equivalency debates), and the American populace (which should be embarrassed).”
Polls show Americans increasingly question Obama’s religious faith. But is this really just the emergence of another political code word?

Taylor Marsh, however, doesn’t think the vast right-wing conspiracy needs any willing dupes in press:

The rise in the belief that Pres. Obama is a Muslim is due to a concerted effort from the right. Barack Obama and his team should have learned this lesson from the ’90s, but instead they were too busy running from that reality. It’s why conservatives have jumped on the Corboda House issue, and why the White House political team’s bungling of it is so deadly. Like health care last August, we’ve got another festering issue out there when the public’s mood is set on fume. Pamela Geller, Newt Gingrich 9/11 rally against the mosque planned for September is going to set the stage for an emotional engine that will drive November elections. Numbers on the economy make it worse, but the bonfire hasn’t begun to blaze.

Whether the Cordoba House is moved or not hardly matters at this point. The rallying cry on 9/11 this year will be the funnel through which the right’s fury will be lit for the midterms. There isn’t a similar fire on the Democratic Left, which is no one’s fault but Pres. Obama, who chose to listen to a team of triangulating, concession fetishists, who believed that courting conservatives was more important than listening to his base and movement progressives who know how to wage a fight.

Karoli at Crooks and Liars disagrees, and apparently feels that declaring this a non-issue will make it go away:

Because it’s “let’s be stupid because Congress is on recess and we like jumping over a cliff” month, the story actually gets some traction, because it was reported by the ever-vigilant Washington Post. That the question was polled at all lends legitimacy to it. That it was reported simply offers the cynical and the stupid cover to believe what is just simply not true, not relevant, and not an issue.

Alan Colmes takes the Dawkins-Hitchens approach: “It’s a sad commentary that it even has to be stated what faith the president observes, as if it should matter whether he follows Christianity, or any religion at all. What if he were a Muslim? What if he were an atheist? Why should that matter? And let’s not forget that some of the same critics who insist that Obama is a Muslim criticized him for going to a Christian church where prayed for 20 years, got married, and baptized his children.”

And for Paul Rosenberg at Open Left, it’s all the fault of you-know-who: “More than anything, what suggests to me is the severe danger that comes from lying to the American people. The Bush Administration did it all the time. Obama promised to clean things up. But he didn’t. He lied about that. He thought that if he just played nice, the Republicans would play nice, too. So there was no need to ‘look backward,’ and examine all the sordid, mean, and nasty–not to say lethal and illegal–things the GOP had done.”

Back to grasping reality, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza thinks the “don’t know” number might be the most worrisome one for the White House:

The political ramifications of the growing uncertainty regarding Obama’s religious affiliation are more difficult to ascertain. There is, without question, some significant level of partisanship inherent in questions about Obama’s faith; the less you like the President, the more likely you are to say he is a Muslim. And, in truth, that 18 percent who falsely identify the President with the Islamic faith would almost certainly never be voting for him anyway.

Perhaps more important from an electoral perspective, however, is the growing number of people who don’t know what religion the President identifies with. While most Americans don’t tend to vote based on religious faith — although being either a Muslim or a Mormon can, among certain demographic groups, complicate a politician’s electoral calculus — they do like to believe that their president is a man of faith.

The Atlantic’s Nicole Allan ponders a trickle-down effect:

If Obama himself were up for re-election in November, the fact that nearly one-fifth of Americans falsely believed he was Muslim, and that Americans in general don’t have the rosiest view of Muslims, might worry Democrats. But it’s unclear whether confusion about the president’s religious identity will trickle down to affect his party’s candidates in congressional and gubernatorial races.

Democrats are already worried about Obama’s plummeting approval and popularity ratings rubbing off on their party’s incumbents, who are facing fierce anti-Washington sentiment at home. The Muslim confusion may not intensify these worries, but it probably won’t soothe them either.

Curiously, Jason Kuznicki of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, thinks the kerfuffle could actually help the Obama agenda:

Here’s where managed ignorance begins to destroy itself. I disagree with the president on a long, long list of policies and decisions — stimulus spending, health care, Citizens United, civil liberties, surveillance, his Supreme Court nominations… the list probably runs to pages if I think about it. He’s been bad in the areas where I knew he’d be bad, and he’s been even worse in the areas where I thought he might be halfway decent.

But every column-inch devoted to this idiot conspiracy theory forestalls meaningful debate by just that much. Which means we don’t get the political opposition we deserve, Obama’s policies don’t get the scrutiny they so desperately cry out for, and Obama becomes… all the more effective at doing just the things that I wish we could prevent.

On the right, Byron York of The Washington Examiner thinks the White House has itself to blame for not dealing with the issue more openly in the past:

The White House blames the situation on a “misinformation campaign” from Obama’s opponents. But Obama and his aides might also blame themselves for the way they’ve handled the Muslim issue over the years. The question did not come out of nowhere. As Obama said, his grandfather was a Muslim. His father was raised a Muslim before becoming, by Obama’s account, “a confirmed atheist.” Obama’s stepfather was a Muslim. His half-sister Maya told the New York Times that her “whole family was Muslim.”

Obama spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia and later, in a conversation with the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, described the Arabic call to prayer, the beginning of which he recited by heart, as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” Given all that, it is entirely accurate and fair to describe Obama as having Muslim roots.

Yet during the campaign his aides shouted down even a measured discussion of the topic, and Obama’s critics could face ostracism simply for uttering the candidate’s middle name…. Many people do not pay close attention to news reports. It’s entirely possible some of them blurred the distinction between “Muslim roots” and “Muslim,” especially since Obama in Cairo celebrated what his campaign had once downplayed. The public may be doing the same thing now, particularly after Obama chose a White House Ramadan iftar dinner to make a high-profile statement in support of the Ground Zero mosque

Hot Air’s Allahpundit thinks this is mostly a case of honest confusion:

As for why he’s so often accused of being Muslim, the default lefty explanation is of course racism but I think it’s more a combination of his middle name, his background growing up in Indonesia, and his attempt to win over Muslim public opinion with his Cairo speech last year. And all of that gets compounded by soundbites that are taken out of context or cleverly edited to make it sound like he’s making admissions about his “true faith.” Just last week a commenter e-mailed claiming that Obama had once told Stephanopoulos that he was a Muslim and I had to send him the link to this post from two years ago to set him right.

It’s all very lame and obnoxious, especially given the testimony from pastors that Obama takes his Christian faith seriously, but much like the Birther thing, there’s virtually nothing you can say to convince someone who’s sure that O is what he thinks he is.

The neo-neocon thinks the confusion stems from the larger haziness of the entire Obama narrative:

One might just as well say he’s a space alien and leave it at that. There is no other president about whom we’ve asked similar questions, because in some essential way we’ve known who they are/were. We didn’t and still don’t really know Obama, although we’re getting there, we’re getting there.

The relevance of the speculation about Obama’s true religious beliefs is that it is a subset of the speculation on his inner core and how that is expressed in his behavior as president. What are his true wishes for, and allegiance to, this country? His actions make a great many people doubt that he has the usual conventional dedication to its history and its best interests at heart, a speculation that—despite all the arguments about the wisdom of previous presidents, and disagreements with their policies—has not been seriously leveled at his predecessors.

It is leveled at Obama, however. And it’s sticking and growing because of a combination of three things about him that are unique in presidential history:

(1) His previous track record in public life was relatively short.
(2) He has kept many of the other salient facts of his life hidden, and the press has allowed him to do so.
(3) He campaigned as one thing and has governed as another—and this is not true just of a detail or two, but of his basic political stance, including how liberal or middle-of-the-road he is.

But the conservative commentator who got the left most riled was John Hinderaker of Power Line:

Obama postures as a citizen of the world who has graced America by condescending to be our President and to instruct us. Some liberals accept this posturing gratefully, but most Americans don’t. Obama has defined himself as literally exotic. Small wonder that some Americans attribute exotic qualities to him. We’re not sure who he is, exactly, but he certainly isn’t one of us. Given the currents that swirl through world events these days, being a Muslim is one interpretation of Obama’s exoticism. Those who construe Obama in this way may well be wrong, but it is not hard to understand why they interpret his aloof non-Americanism in this way.

“I think on some level, Hinderaker is right,” responds American Prospect’s Adam Serwer, who goes on to explain why Hinderaker is mostly wrong:

Some conservatives see Obama as being different from them, and they deploy “Muslim” as an epithet to express their suspicion and anger toward him. I’m sure part of it also has to do with conservative elites reinforcing or at least winking at the notion that Obama is being deceptive about his religious beliefs and that describing someone as a “Muslim” is some kind of an insult. As the Pew poll notes, “Beliefs about Obama’s religion are closely linked to political judgments about him. Those who say he is a Muslim overwhelmingly disapprove of his job performance, while a majority of those who think he is a Christian approve of the job Obama is doing.” In a less politically correct time they probably would have used a different word.

Slate’s David Weigel runs with that thought: “Maybe before the Great Mosque Freak-Out of 2010 this would have been more surprising, this idea that ‘Muslim’ is synonymous with ‘un-American’ or ‘anti-American.’ But for three weeks we’ve been asked to admire the resilience and bravery of the family members of 9/11 victims who believe that the existence of a Muslim worship center defiles the area near Ground Zero. It’s acceptable, respectable to argue that this religion, not just the radical perversions of it, is a threat to America. So it becomes a way of describing what’s wrong with Barack Obama.”

And Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen takes it to its conclusion:

In other words, we’ve come to a point in our discourse at which “Muslim” isn’t an adjective used to describe 1.5 billion people; it’s an adjective some Americans use as an insult. While some Democrats used to criticize George W. Bush with words like “idiot” and “liar,” Obama’s detractors now use “Muslim” in much the same way. And the more the president’s support falters, the more “Muslim” he appears in the eyes of his critics.

As a cultural matter, this is insane. As a political matter, there doesn’t appear to be much anyone can do to convince Americans that the president is not, in fact, a secret Muslim.

Doug Mataconis of Below the Beltway is hardly a liberal, but he’s no less disturbed than the preceding troika:

I disapprove of the President’s job performance and I don’t think that the President is Muslim, for example… But, for some group of Americans, quite obviously, opposing the President means that you believe every stupid conspiracy theory about him, like the 22% of Americans who believe that President Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks but choose not to prevent them. There’s no rational reason for people think things like this, they just do.

That last explanation is disturbing on some level, though. If thinking badly of the President makes someone more likely to think he’s a Muslim, then the next logical conclusion is that people think there’s something bad about being a Muslim. Unfortunately, as another poll out today seems to indicate, that seems to be exactly what some Americans think … It is, quite honestly, easy to believe dark and conspiratorial things about a group of people when you don’t know anyone who belongs to that group.

His final point isn’t any less true for being familiar. What is new, however, is that you can tar the politician of your choice with those conspiracies even if you know he’s not literally a member of the group. So, I’ll ask it again: How many of the Americans who say they think Barack Obama is a Muslim actually believe that he is one? Kudos to anyone who can come up with an answer.

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SOURCE: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/when-is-a-muslim-not-a-muslim/