33% American voters believe Obama is a Muslim

It is becoming clearer by the day that Race and Religion are intersecting in the far right’s onslaught against the Democratic Party candidate Senator Barack ObamaBarack Obama.

Nicholas Kristof’s Op Ed column in the NYT of September 20 discusses the startling truth that barely six weeks from the US presidential election, almost one-third of American voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.

“In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding.” The real loser during this process isn’t just Senator Obama, but the entire political process, says Kristof.

A Pew Research Center poll of survey released a few days back found that only half of Americans accepted that Mr. Obama was a Christian. Meanwhile, 13% of registered voters thought that he was a Muslim, while 16% were not sure about his religion.

Another widely held belief is that Mr Obama took his oath of office on the Koran. Some conservative Christian circles and Christian radio stations have promoted the idea that Mr. Obama may be the Antichrist. Some online shops sell T-shirts, mugs and stickers exploiting this absurd idea. Some shirts and stickers portray a large “O” with horns, above a caption: “The Anti-Christ.” What utter rubbish, but it works!

While Senator McCain personally has never raised doubts about Mr. Obama’s religion, his supporters on the far right are doing their best to exploit people’s prejudices because it helps their candidate in a tight race. McCain may not be popular with evangelicals, being much less of a churchgoer than Obama. But they will vote for McCain either on grounds of race, or if they suspect that Obama may be on Satan’s side.

What is happening, Kristof thinks, is that religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. Publicly, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so disapproval is camouflaged by raising the issue about Obama not being sufficiently Christian or American. Senator Obama’s opponents, in short, are trying to "otherize" or de-Americanize him.

Kristof refers to Obama’s interview of Obama in 2007, in which he asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia. Senator Obama replied that the Arabic call to prayer was “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,” and he repeated the opening of it. This should surprise no one: some of the muezzins who make the call to prayer are trained rigorously in Arab countries for many years, so that their sonorous call to prayer is pleasing to the ear and attracts worshipers to the mosque. The human call to prayer has been the tradition since the earliest days of Islam when Prophet Mohammad rejected using bells, and selected freed African slave Hazrat Bilal to be Islam’s first muezzin.

Religious bigots like Jerome Corsi, whose book titled “The Obama Nation,” is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, have twisted Obama’s innocent remark to impute that he is a Muslim. This is like considering me to be a Christian just because I am very fond of Bruckner’s Te Deum and Handel’s Messiah.

Concluding his column, Kristof urges journalists “to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.”