Where there’s smoke, there’s a fire, right?

Well, not necessarily.  The “smoke” may be due to causes other than fire, such as overly exuberant cigar puffers, car exhaust, Indians sending signals, or even a thick fog or a very low-hanging cloud.

Then, again, it could be a fire.

There’s been a whole lot of smoke surrounding Barack Hussein Obama concerning his actual religion as opposed to his professed faith and suggestions that he could be a closet Islamist, a Muslim.

The subject has been all but beaten to death both on the pages of this blog and in other media but, much like a bad odor, that pesky smoke just won’t go away.

Obama’s Muslim middle name, his Muslim heritage on his father’s side, the Islamic belief that a son must adhere to the father’s religion, his years in Muslim Indonesia, even his college roomies at Columbia, some of whom professed that faith, all cast a pall over his repeated declarations that he is in fact a Christian and always has been.

There has been no dearth of support for those repeated declarations from all segments of the media which have gone to amazing lengths to disparage those who dared say Obama was a Muslim.  Such articles as this ridicule that contention: http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/01/05/swiftboating-obamas-religion/.

Indeed, his defenders have been so adamant and ceaseless in his defense that someone who thought that there might be even a smidgen of truth to the idea that he could hold Islamic beliefs might come to believe that Obama and the media protest far too much.  If someone makes a preposterous allegation, would not the best approach be to simply deny it, ignore it, and forget it?

However, the Muslim beat goes on and on and on, fueled as much by the denials as by the charges, and now the word is that Muslims are being encouraged to turn out en masse next Tuesday although CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations contends it has no favorite dog in this fight: http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=38455.

What is well known by now is that Obama was raised by his white, Kansan mother, the former Ann Dunham, after his black, Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., deserted the family when he was two, and later by his maternal grandparents in Honolulu.  They were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists.

His youth, therefore was clearly Muslim-centric and he certainly would not have gotten any Christian upbringing by his mother who was a professed atheist who, subsequent to being abandoned, married yet another Muslim.  

More heavy smoke and no denials will change those facts.

Of course, it is true that Obama was later married in a Christian church, Trinity United Church of Christ on the Southside of Chicago, and his two children were baptized there, with all three ceremonies performed by the very controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  

Then, too, Trinity United’s mission incorporates a commitment to a “black value” system rather than to all-inclusive American values and has its own Muslim connection in that it recently honored Louis Farrakhan, a racist, anti-Semitic Black Muslim. 

Compound that with the anti-American tirades of Wright and the almost as inflammatory sermons of the church’s new pastor,  Reverend Otis Moss, the plot and the smoke thicken around Obama leading to the question of how a good Christian could ever have felt very warm and fuzzy sitting in those pews for twenty years.  Yet he did. 

(As an aside, I’ve noticed many changes in Trinity United’s “brand new website” (http://www.tucc.org/index.php) since Wright hit the fan last spring and since Obama won the primary contest.  Now, purely coincidentally, many more white faces are featured and it has a kinder, gentler feel.)

No one can say for certain whether Barack Hussein Obama has any hidden and affinity for the faith of Mohammed and Islam’s billion plus adherents worldwide, no one except Barack Hussein Obama.  What can be said is that if he does, then one of the greatest scams in the history of politics and of religion has been perpetrated on the American people.

Immersed as we are in a worldwide war with Islam, we will all pay a heavy price if in fact it is a scam.