Barack Obama's Muslim Heritage

Discover The Networks reports:

Vis à vis Barack Obama’s religious upbringing, Islam scholar Daniel Pipes reports the following:

“In Islam, religion passes from the father to the child. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. [his Kenyan birth father] was a Muslim who named his boy Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Only Muslim children are named ‘Hussein’.… [Barack Obama’s] stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: ‘My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.’ An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that ‘All the relatives of Barry's [Barack’s] father were very devout Muslims.’”

Obama’s good friend, the attorney and novelist Scott Turow, writes that Obama as a child spent “two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school.” School records show that when Obama attended Catholic school, he was enrolled as a Muslim.

Journalist Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Obama’s childhood friends that “Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque.”

Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune found that “Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers.”

An Indonesian friend of Obama, Zulfin Adi, states that “[Obama] was Muslim. He went to the mosque. I remember him wearing a sarong [a garment associated with Muslims].”

Obama's former classmate in Indonesia, the aforementioned Rony Amir, recalls Obama as having been “previously quite religious in Islam.”

In December 2007 Obama would say, “I've always been a Christian. The only connection I've had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country [Kenya]. But I've never practiced Islam.”

In February 2008 he elaborated, “I have never been a Muslim.… [O]ther than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for four years when I was a child [Indonesia, 1967-71], I have very little connection to the Islamic religion.”

You could understand why some people think he's a Muslim and a dishonest person.