{"id":505,"date":"2008-01-24T12:18:29","date_gmt":"2008-01-24T17:18:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/24\/the-lie-that-wont-die-obama-as-radical-muslim\/"},"modified":"2008-01-24T14:36:01","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T19:36:01","slug":"the-lie-that-wont-die-obama-as-radical-muslim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/24\/the-lie-that-wont-die-obama-as-radical-muslim\/","title":{"rendered":"The lie that won’t die"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama as “radical muslim”<\/strong>
\nBy Ed Madden, Columbia<\/strong><\/p>\n

I ran into a friend in the grocery store, and we started talking about politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope you\u2019re not planning to vote for that Obama,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Why? \u201cYou know he\u2019s a Muslim.\u201d <\/p>\n

Living in South Carolina, you get used to hearing the national news talk about the nasty politics of our state. We are the land of push polls and Lee Atwater\u2014the state that famously spread false rumors about McCain\u2019s child in the last election, the state that saw religious prejudice alive and well in fake Christmas cards sent out last month to attack Romney. It\u2019s become the standard intro to national stories about the Republican primary here\u2014as predictable as the inevitable Confederate flag question at the debates.<\/p>\n

But here I was, talking with a friend in Kroger\u2014a friend whose opinion I valued\u2014hearing that Barak Obama was a radical Muslim who refused to put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in. \u201cHe won\u2019t put his hand on the Bible,\u201d he repeated.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It was one thing to hear family members from Elgin and Rock Hill argue that white country folks they live among wouldn\u2019t vote for a black man, much less one named \u201cObama.\u201d But this was something else. To substantiate what he was saying, he even cited Snopes.com<\/a>, the website famous for its examinations of urban and email myths.<\/p>\n

So when I got home, I went to Snopes.com. Not only did I find webpages that dispelled email rumors that Obama is a radical Muslim, but I also found a notice that one of the emails currently in circulation actually cites Snopes. The email claims, \u201cWe were told this was checked out on snopes.com. It is factual. Check for yourself.\u201d There\u2019s a link to the website on Snopes.com. As the Snopes editors add: \u201cIt\u2019s our guess that whoever included that bit is counting on folks to not check, as our article says the opposite: that the polemic is not factual but rather is false.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later that evening, my grandmother called. I love talking politics with my grandmother, something I wish I\u2019d discovered much earlier. A country woman and an evangelical Christian, she is appalled by George Bush and the war, appalled by the ways working class rural folk vote against their own best interests. She shakes her head when she describes her women\u2019s Bible class and their single-issue focus on abortion.<\/p>\n

She called to ask about the upcoming primary. \u201cDon\u2019t vote for Obama,\u201d she said. Why? \u201cHe\u2019s Muslim.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of days later, when I went to get my hair cut, the sweet African-American woman cutting my hair also told me her beliefs wouldn\u2019t let her vote for Obama: she\u2019s a Christian, and he\u2019s a Muslim.<\/p>\n

According to news reports\u2014including an interview with Obama\u2019s Buddhist sister in Sunday\u2019s New York Times<\/a>\u2014Obama has been a member of a Christian church for over 20 years.<\/p>\n

But neither my friend nor my grandmother nor the salon stylist believed me when I said this is a myth. All were convinced. While they would vote Democratic, neither would vote for Obama because of this story\u2014the lie that refuses to die.<\/p>\n

I know that Obama\u2019s complicated cultural background lends credence to this myth. A Kenyan father, an Indonesian step-father, a childhood and education abroad, an anthropologist mother who encouraged her children to understand all religions\u2014these things may seem risky to some folks. <\/p>\n

I also know that racism and religious bigotry\u2014not to mention dirty politics from both parties\u2014fuel this particular myth. I know that the internet enables wide distribution of this story\u2014just as it keeps that Neiman Marcus cookie recipe story alive and online long after it has been disproved.<\/p>\n

But this particular myth\u2014driven by anti-Islamic fears, political urgency, and the racism we like to think Obama\u2019s campaign belies\u2014has an extraordinary tenacity, even among those I trust and love, those I think of as neither racist nor bigoted, those whose political opinions I value.<\/p>\n

What does this say about the racial and religious differences that still divide us? What does this say about our ability as Americans to disentangle our fear of terrorists from our ability to relate to the Muslim neighbors? What does this say, indeed, about our ability to export a \u201csecular\u201d democracy to the rest of the world? <\/p>\n

More importantly, what does this say about the power of rumor, the power of internet myths, to affect our political decisions?<\/p>\n

We do what we can. I assured them all this was a rumor. And I sent the Snopes.com webpage links to my friend.<\/p>\n

Ed Madden is Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina.
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Obama as “radical muslim” By Ed Madden, Columbia I ran into a friend in the grocery store, and we started talking about politics. \u201cI hope you\u2019re not planning to vote for that Obama,\u201d he said. Why? \u201cYou know he\u2019s a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-newscommentary","category-network-newsevents","category-sc-newscommentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}