I’d assumed that one of the few side benefits of the Jeremiah Wright controversy is that no one, anywhere, could still possibly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. After all, everyone in the country got to see a whole lot of Obama’s Christian pastor and his Christian church. It’s hard to imagine anyone still buying this foolishness.
And yet, in the NYT/CBS poll (pdf) released yesterday, respondents were asked if they knew what Obama’s religious affiliation is. A clear majority (60%) said they didn’t know, while 7% said they believe him to be a Muslim. Oddly enough, the same percentage came to the same conclusion in a NYT/CBS poll five months ago. Some lies are apparently hard to kill.
(The news wasn’t much better among Democratic primary voters in the poll, 6% of whom also falsely believe Obama is a Muslim.)
Remarkably, the right isn’t just reveling in the public confusion; it’s still trying to help perpetuate it. The National Review’s Lisa Schiffren felt compelled to publish this item yesterday:
Barack Obama has emphatically denied that he was ever a Muslim, practicing or otherwise. Other people, including family members and teachers, remember things differently. Daniel Pipes collects the varying information here. Several elementary-school teachers in Indonesia have told reporters that he was enrolled as a Muslim — and thus studied Koran instead of the Catechism — at the Catholic school he attended. One of his various half sisters says it too, and several passages in his autobiography seem to indicated [sic] the same thing.
Make of it what you will. Certainly that he may have been educated or raised Muslim is no disqualifier, but if he is lying about his upbringing for political acceptance, it speaks to character. We don’t know if he is, but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank.
First, let’s not lose sight of the notion that the National Review is supposed to be one of the more mainstream conservative publications, not just some fringe C-list blog. And yet, this is what NRO is publishing.
Second, the notion that Daniel Pipes “is no crank” is debatable.
Matthew Duss sets the record straight.
I tend to regard cranks as mostly harmless eccentrics, like people who believe that our planet was seeded by aliens who will soon return to harvest us, or people who design and construct hugely complicated machines to perform odd combinations of simple household tasks, or Dr. Phil. There’s nothing harmless about Daniel Pipes, a right wing scholar-activist who, since 9/11, has made a career of trafficking in hoary old Orientalist stereotypes in order to stoke Americans’ prejudice against, and fear of, Islam.
Pipes runs the Middle East Forum, an organization which answers the question “What if the John Birch Society had its own think tank?” Pipes also oversees Campus Watch, a project that keeps tabs on scholars it deems to be insufficiently pro-Israel.
Last summer Pipes spearheaded a campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York, a public school focused on Arab culture and language. The campaign eventually caused the resignation of the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser. Pipes based his hostility to the school on what he called “the basic problems implicit in an Arabic-language school: the tendency to Islamist and Arabist content and proselytizing.” Needless to say, Pipes offered no evidence for that claim.
In keeping with his stated belief that Arab- and Muslim-Americans deserve to be subjected to “special scrutiny,” Pipes apparently thinks the question of whether Barack Obama ever practiced Islam as a child is so important to the future of the American republic that, since December, he has penned three different articles on that subject, always making sure to apply a thin veneer of “scholarly rigor” over what is in fact nothing more than an attempt to smear by insinuation and innuendo. Despicable.
It’s no longer clear where the “crank” line exists among the conservative mainstream, or even if the line exists at all. Either way, it’s a mistake to take Pipes seriously. He’s one of the nation’s leading professional Muslim-haters, and he’s been responsible for trying to smear Obama with this nonsense for quite some time.
That National Review would peddle such stupidity leads me to think that maybe, just maybe, The Corner is not a reliable outlet for credible political content.