The dangers of thinking that everyone is as superficial as we are

Barack Obama is being given ominous advice from leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to brace himself for an early assault from terrorists.(...) Lord West of Spithead, the Home Office Security Minister, spoke recently of a "huge threat", saying: "There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this." The Times

The day after the new president's election, al Qaeda issued a little-noticed statement declaring Barack Obama a murtad, i.e. an apostate whose betrayal of Islam is judged the most heinous. Believers have the duty to execute a murtad unlike other non-believers whose death sentence is optional. Debka

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During the recent presidential campaign there were many scurrilous and totally unfounded attacks circulating on the Internet accusing Barack Obama of being a crypto-Muslim and an enemy of Israel. This is nonsense.

I think that it is idiotic for anyone to say or to suggest that Barack Obama is not a Christian or a friend of Israel or that he in any way supports the Palestinians. Everything he says or has said, does or has done, his every vote in the Senate, even his naming Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, all bear this out. I repeat, that this line of attack is both ignorant and stupid.

What I do find strange is that at the same time some of Obama's most enthusiastic supporters think that, in spite of his support for Israel and his conspicuous Christianity, that simply because of his color or because he is famously named "Barack Hussein" it is going to have some enormous "healing" or soothing effect on America' relations with the Islamic world. As we can see from Al Qaeda's communique above... Nothing could be further from the truth.

These people are not Disneyland "cast members": they are not playing word games. This is not a drill.

As I have had it explained to me, if your father and grandfather were Muslims and if you have a Muslim name, but profess another religion publicly and support the enemies of Islam (Israel) that makes you an apostate, a "murtad". Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article on the subject of apostasy.

The four major Sunni and the one major Shia Madh'hab (schools of Islamic jurisprudence) agree that a sane adult male apostate must be executed

If you look up the subject in Google you will find some 1,160,000 entries referring to the subject. Laws to this effect are on the books of several Muslim countries at this very moment.

It seems to me obvious that for the United States of America to elect a president named "Barack Hussein", who is a practicing Christian and a supporter of Israel will be seen by many Muslims as the ultimate provocation and the fulfillment of the most paranoiac fantasies of the most extreme Salafists.

They would say that this is what America does to Muslims: not only does it persecute them, insult the Prophet and defame their faith, it takes the son and grandson of Muslims and turns him into the chief killer and persecutor of Muslims. A Muslim version of Damien.

The bottom line is that you can't have it both ways. It is one thing if somebody named "Bill" or "George" or "John" or "Hillary" bombs Pakistan or Iran and supplies the Israelis with weapons and quite another if someone with "Hussein" anywhere in his name does it... It's adding insult to injury. Even Daniel Pipes couldn't invent a more insulting provocation to Muslims. DS