I find the Daniel Pipes articles, Barack Obama’s Muslim Childhood being the latest, persuasive that there is more to this story than the denunciations from the Obama campaign or CNN or Rick Moran. Pipes presents a thoughtful piece with numerous cites that I would like to see rebutted–rather than the claims of a viral email–before anyone declares this issue has been settled as a smear.
Appealing to Ali Eteraz is no help. He is a disingenuous apologist for Islam. See his numerous, weaselly, often nasty exchanges with Robert Spenser of Jihadwatch.
It doesn’t matter to me if Obama did or didn’t practice Islam as a child. However, he is a very unusual, if not downright bizarre, candidate and many of the criticisms of him are valid. It would be wrong for those criticisms, some of which sound almost as strange as the claim that Obama was a Muslim, to be tossed casually into a trash bin labeled “Smears” which is the way the Obama campaign prefers to dispose of such criticisms.
