“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”
                                                                           -  Adolf Hitler

I doubt that in the history of mankind there have been more lies disseminated faster and more furiously than in the two years since Barack Obama announced he would be seeking the Presidency.  I, personally, have reached the point at which I find it not only boring and irresponsible, but downright loathsome.  I believe there are three key factors at play here:

1. There is a vocal right-wing racist element in our society that wants to believe anything disparaging about Obama, no matter how ridiculous, simply because he is black.  They are willing to not only distort the truth but lie and attempt to bend facts to fit their nonsensical theories.
2. There is still a large segment of the population who is willing to regard anything they see on the Internet as being true, so long as it comports with their personal pre-dispositions.
3. The Internet has rendered fact-checking, responsible journalism almost moot in today’s world.  There was a time when a reporter either in print, on the radio or on TV was held accountable for reporting only what could be substantiated.  If they didn’t report what was truthful, they could find themselves publishing a retraction, losing their jobs or even facing a libel suit.  Today, the Internet allows virtually anyone to say anything they want regardless of the level of its veracity without being held to account.  And this lack of accountability in truth has spilled over into both radio and TV.

A friend recently sent me a link to a YouTube video, entitled Obama Admits He Is A Muslim and asked what I thought of it.  If you are so inclined and want to waste ten minutes of your life that you can never get back, you can watch the video by clicking on the picture below. 

The bottom line is this video is another of the multitude of abrogations of the truth by which we now find ourselves repeatedly assaulted. 

To begin with, the “writers, producers, editors and publishers” of the video entitle it, “Obama Admits He is a Muslim,” yet they include one of those “legal indemnification” blurbs that go by so quickly you can only read it if you can pause the video at just the right point. 

This is what they flash on the screen at the start of the video - “Legal Disclaimer: The writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are not stating, claiming, or implying that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, or that Obama himself claimed or admitted to being a Muslim.  Rather the writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are only examining the evidence surrounding the rumor that Barack Hussein Obama might be a secret Muslim.”

So, my first question to these jokers would be, “If you are only ‘examining the evidence surrounding the rumor that Barack Hussein Obama might be a secret Muslim,” how can you justify entitling your video, “Obama Admits He Is A Muslim?”  An examination of evidence, by definition, is supposed to be a non-biased review of facts, yet the title of the video clearly indicates the producers already have a point of view and the whole point of the video is their attempt to convince the viewer that they are right.

I viewed the entire video and, despite its title, not once did I ever hear Obama say, or even imply, he is a Muslim.

It was blatantly obvious that whoever put the video together edited a number of different videos and put them together in such as way as to make it appear Obama was saying something he was not.  There were also numerous points at which the video was cut off in mid-sentence so that, syntactically, the completion of the sentence is left to the viewer to infer that Obama was admitting to his Muslim faith.  If Obama had actually said he is a Muslim, though, I’m certain the editors would have left that footage in the video.  So it is reasonable to assume Obama did not complete the sentence(s) as the video producers would have us believe.

But in the worst case, even if Obama were a Muslim, the only reason to vilify him for it is because we fear that which is different, that which we do not understand.  We did not judge George W. Bush on his attendance at a Protestant church or on his participation in prayer breakfasts; we judged him based on his miserable performance as President of the United States.

John Kennedy was only narrowly elected President because we had never before had a Catholic President and many people held that against him.  Yet, in three short years he proved to be one of the greatest leaders this country has ever had.

We also need to consider that, unlike Bush, Obama understands that making progress with the Middle East means we, as a nation, have to have an understanding of Islam.  To the Muslims of the Middle East, their religion is much more central to their everyday lives than is the religion of most Americans.  One of our greatest failures in dealing with the Middle East is our lack of this understanding, just as our greatest failure in Vietnam was our failure to understand the thinking and way of life of the people of Vietnam.  We Americans tend to assume everyone naturally sees the world as we do.

The purveyors of this video, along with many right-wing know nothings, seem to have a real problem with Obama quoting from the Koran.  Well, I’ve quoted Confucius and I’ve quoted Karl Marx; I don’t think that makes me either a follower of Confucianism or a communist.  In fact, the Koran contains some of the most beautifully written philosophical teachings on pacifism in the world.  But just as with the  Bible, if you hunt hard enough, you can find a passage that, taken out of context, will support just about anything you want to believe.

Finally, I believe anyone who decries Islam is nothing more than a religious bigot.  This video, and many others I have seen like it, want to equate “jihad” (and in their case jihad = terrorism, which in the Koran it does not) with Islam.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Muslims who use the Koran to justify violence are just as bad as the Catholics who used the Bible to justify the inquisitions of the Middle Ages and the Southern bigots who used the Bible to justify segregation, acts of violence against the Negro and, ultimately, the KKK.

Too many people in this country only believe in “freedom of religion” so long as we believe as they believe.  Somewhere between 1776 and 2009 we lost sight of the tolerance that was supposed to be the bedrock of our experiment in democracy.