Obama, 9/11, and Freedom of Conscience

My Friend Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has a great piece on Obama and 9/11 which is partly reproduced below:

The most important piece on Obama's muslim upbringing and what it means it Dr. Andrew Bostom's piece in today's American Thinker.

I know Ibn Warraq and his youth is remarkably similar to Obama's. Both received the same religious training in Islam, Ibn had no more formal Islamic education than Obama, and look at how different they are in how they honestly talk about Islam.

Ibn Warraq's formal childhood experience of Islam mirrored Barack Obama's -- it was no more extensive. Yet despite copious evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama has gone to great lengths to deny even a nominal childhood Muslim upbringing. These repeated, often shrill and accusatory denials are accompanied by a disturbing, if predictable silence: not once has Senator Obama celebrated the remarkable freedom of conscience he had here in America to decide in his mid to late 20s that he would practice Christianity openly, and devotedly, absent any consideration of his childhood Muslim background.

Mr. Obama has thus far squandered the unparalleled opportunity to highlight and extol a profoundly important virtue of this flawed, but still great country of ours, personified by his life story: America's singular, unwavering support for true freedom of conscience.

Surely if Obama is to live up to his followers (and his own) pretensions of being a "transformative" figure, then he should be ready to elucidate, frankly, the utter lack of freedom of conscience in the Muslim world, relative to the US; why his own life trajectory demonstrates this difference; and how the fight against global jihadism is, at its core, about the protection of this most profoundly important Western ideal.

Obama, 9/11, and Freedom of Conscience Dr. Andrew Bostom

During an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News which aired Sunday September 7, 2009, Barack Obama bemoaned what he claimed were insidious Republican attempts to "promulgate," falsely, his "Muslim connections." Senator Obama then made a minor gaffe (at ~ 2 minutes 50 seconds, here), in his half-hearted exculpation of Senator McCain: "John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith." Stephanopoulos, who earlier defended McCain against Obama's general anti-Republican allegations, then corrected Obama's misstatement with instantaneous, politically-correct alacrity, reminding the Democratic Presidential nominee, "...[you meant] your Christian faith." And certainly the full context of the discussion makes clear Obama was not in any way acknowledging some personal embrace of Islam, when he responded, "What I meant to say, he [McCain] hasn't suggested that I am Muslim."

But the self-aggrieved, whining tone of Senator Obama's interview struck me as particularly inappropriate occurring just four days prior to his scheduled appearance with Senator McCain at Ground Zero, in lower Manhattan. Both men will suspend their Presidential campaigns to be present at a joint, non-partisan event, Thursday, September 11, 2008, commemorating the 7^th anniversary of the cataclysmic acts of mass-murdering jihad terrorism on September 11, 2001

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