Abysmal Ignorance

When Americans were facing the early stages of their last national electoral process, one whose outcome was to amaze the international community, let alone the U.S. electorate, a surprising few people on the streets of any U.S. city could recognize the name of a very different candidate for the U.S. Democratic party. When asked by roving reporters what name-recognition the name Barack Obama brought to mind, people responded with the reply that he was an international terrorist.

Osama bin Laden doesn't really sound like Barack Obama, but both are sufficiently exotic-sounding, resonating of a heritage and a tradition and not least, a religion so unlike that which came most readily to the minds of most Americans that the misappropriation of identify seemed explicable, even if remotely so. Since then, Americans have had ample opportunity to scrutinize the persona and performance of their new president.

The first biracial American elected to the highest executive office of the land. A man whose highly unusual background, moreover, and complex relationship to his country made him suspect in the opinion of many. Their suspicions appear to have grown, rather than be curtailed throughout the time this man has been in public office at the helm of government. The world's most ferocious democracy invests itself in rumours and innuendos beloved of conspiracy theorists.

Whereas before the election took place, a small segment of the population strenuously defended their belief that Mr. Obama was a practising Muslim, his time in office has not relieved them of this determined belief. His recent remarks respecting the proposed building and installation of a huge mosque two blocks from the collapse of the World Trade Center in the horrendous attacks by fanatical Muslim jihadists have done him no favours in this respect.

He loftily upheld the rights of U.S. Muslims and the obligations of all U.S. citizens to recognize that right in reflection of lawful freedoms guaranteed to all Americans in the free practise of their religions, in an obvious defence of the planners of the Cordoba Initiative that came back to sting him. In a transparently obvious bid to save himself after the pronouncements' public and viral backlash, he backtracked on the "wisdom" of the mosque placement.

Even without the clumsily righteous declaration of support for the imposition upon the New York landscape of a sacred monument to a religion whose many clerics have been supportive of violent jihad targeting the United States as Islam's deservingly-primary enemy, a large demographic of voters would see in Mr. Obama "the other", a covert enemy of the country's traditions and values, a foreign interloper-by-cunning-stealth.

Popular-media rags blare out headlines accusing the American President of false citizenship, of harbouring an agenda that is meant to be of great harm to the country he now heads. Where a larger percentage of voters felt assured on his inauguration that he was a practising Christian, that number has now succumbed to a larger number of those same voters insistent that he is a Muslim.

Those Americans who see President Obama as a Christian have a far greater approval rating of his performance on behalf of the country than those who believe him to be Muslim, and who consider his governance to be an utter disaster. Fully one-quarter of Americans persist in their belief he was born outside the U.S.

"Obama's Secret Life Exposed!"