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The Paranoid Style

I’m sorry, but I just find the idea of minaret-shaped candies extremely amusing. ~Reihan Who wouldn’t? On a more serious note, Reihan was recently venturing into the bizarre territory of public opinion about Obama’s religion: But there’s something so forehead-slappingly strange about the notion that you can’t help but wonder how, even after 100 days […]

I’m sorry, but I just find the idea of minaret-shaped candies extremely amusing. ~Reihan

Who wouldn’t?

On a more serious note, Reihan was recently venturing into the bizarre territory of public opinion about Obama’s religion:

But there’s something so forehead-slappingly strange about the notion that you can’t help but wonder how, even after 100 days in office, Obama retains this air of mystery. In October, before the election, the Pew Research Center found that only 51 percent of Americans believed that Obama was a Christian, while 12 percent were convinced that he was a Muslim. The good people at Pew asked the question again in March, and they found that the numbers had barely changed: 48 percent think Obama is a Christian and 11 percent think he’s a Muslim. The rest are unsure.

I share the forehead-slapping incomprehension, and I have said more than a few times when confronted with the idiocy of the Obama-is-Muslim nonsense, but I wish Reihan had kept the paragraph he quotes as part of the original item. This is the paragraph I mean:

So despite the fact that Obama has been a church-going Christian for most of his adult life, more than a tenth of the country believes that while roaming the streets of Jakarta as an elementary schooler, Obama met some wily bearded imam who lured him into his roving Muslim-mobile with delicious minaret-shaped candies and converted him to radical Islam. Dazzled by his obvious intelligence, and convinced long before David Axelrod that Americans were itching to elect a half-Kenyan youth as president, he also sold young Obama on the idea of keeping his Islamic zealotry under wraps. That way he could transform America into a radical Islamic caliphate without anyone ever noticing.

This is, of course, brilliant, and it is a pity Reihan didn’t use it in the final version, since I think it conveys very effectively how absurd the fears of Obama’s Muslim connections are. After all, this would not merely be a case of taqiyya, but some kind of super turbo-charged taqiyya the likes of which no one has ever seen.

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