Apostate For President

I must admit that this particular angle hadn't occurred to me before-

For the first time, the Associated Press actually admits that Barack Obama was a Muslim in his childhood...Now that the Associated Press has given this fact their blessing, it does raise a rather uncomfortable question for a man who wants to be the commander in chief of the United States. The penalty under well-established shari’a law for apostasy—leaving Islam—is death. How would the world’s 249 gazillion Muslims react to having an American president who is also a Muslim apostate?

It's certainly an intriguing question- I wonder how Obama will try to get that all-important Muslim vote in the States?

UPDATE - Obama's camp roundly denies that he was ever a Muslim. It's interesting to note that the claims that he attended a madrassa have been debunked by reporters visiting the schools now. Obama attended between '69 and '71. A strong argument if ever I heard one! And it completely ignores the fact that there's plenty in the Koran itself which is unpleasant- it's not just the Wahhabi strain which causes problems.

Anyway, it's interesting to note that on Obama's website, in the very article denying his Muslim faith, it notes that he "was not raised by his father – an atheist Obama met once in his life before he died." Which is interesting because his father separated from Obama's mother when he was two years old. Which puts a much different shine on things. His mother then married an Indonesian, hence Obama's stay in that country. His website claims that he was raised in a "secular household", but I think it would be interesting to know whether or not his step-father was a Muslim too (perhaps his step-father was a practising Muslim as some point out). And Obama himself has written about studying the Koran while at that Indonesian school.

Now, whether or not he was "supposed" to be a Muslim makes not a jot of difference to me- it's his lack of any discernible experience and appalling political stance which grates- but it would be nice if apparently deliberate distortions like "met once", among others, were laid to rest. Perhaps his real father was Muslim in name only (or perhaps he was an athiest as the Obama website has it-though he had a Muslim funeral), perhaps Obama really did come from a completely secular household- at the end of the day this would be a non-issue if the truth were on show. However, at the moment the Obama camp seems to be carefully stepping around the issue. As Debbie Schlussel notes in her study of this tangled web, Obama was registered at the Catholic school in Indonesia as a Muslim.

He's now a practising Christian- and I don't really think that he's some sort of closet Muslim trying to sneak past the electorate; the problem here is an issue of transparency and truth.