In the opinion of Arlington (Tennessee) Mayor Russell Wiseman, President Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday night on the war in Afghanistan was deliberately timed to block the Christian message of the “Peanuts” television Christmas special.

Wiseman made the statements on his Facebook page, where he declared Obama to be a Muslim. Only people on Wiseman’s “friend’s list” had access to the post. He has more than 1,600 friends on Facebook.
–via The Commercial Appeal

Before I get to the main reason why I am writing today, let me address the good Mayor’s comment that President Obama is a Muslim. He has said time and time again that he is not, but even if he is lying, take a look at his behavior. He eats pork, drinks alcohol, consorts with folks of all faiths, goes to a Christian church and never prays. He’s a very bad Muslim, if he is. More than that, he preempted the Peanuts Christmas Special to order 30,000 troops into a Muslim country! With friends like that….

It is just one of many assertions people have made about the President and it amazes me how tolerated those assertions are. In some cases they are tantamount to sedition and treason. “There’s going to be bloodshed, one self-proclaimed “patriot” told a BBC reporter yesterday. Opponents of the present just keep throwing charges hoping something will stick. All of these conspiracies are so absurd that if they were the plot of a movie I’d find it to ridiculous to watch. Do the “birthers” really believe our armed forces allowed a man to become commander-in-chief who faked his birth certificate? And make up your mind tea baggers, is he a socialist, Muslim, Black nationalist, follower of radical black Christian ministers or a fascist? All of the above is not a choice.

But what I want to focus on is the assertion that he is a Muslim. He’s not, but even if he were, this should not worry us. The mayor’s absurd assertions are in indicative of the fact that far too many Westerners have totally irrational, paranoid fears about Islam and rationality has nothing to do with them. Similar fears motivated the referendum against minarets in Switzerland, a non-existent problem, as Peter Stamm argues in the New York Times. The irrational and absurd things said about Islam are very much reminiscent of things that were once widely held true about Jews and that led to widespread persecution for centuries, followed by the Holocaust.

There are places in the world where Islam is incredibly conservative, brutal, and oppressive. In my opinion one of the worst is our erstwhile ally Saudi Arabia, a country in which women can’t drive, and Islam is practiced literally. You can lose a hand in Saudi Arabic for stealing, and death is the penalty for adultery, for women, anyway. More than that, when death is the penalty for a crime, it is not through something like lethal injection or even lethal injection, but often through stoning, slow and painful. But there are Islamic feminists who make strong arguments for women’s rights within the context of Islam and its texts, and in most countries the status of women is relatively good or advancing.

It is also clear that some Muslims believe in violence as a means to achieve political ends. Americans have known that since September 11, Europe has known it for decades and Muslims themselves have suffered from it more than anyone. But these are a minority and it is not inherently part of the religion any more than it is of any religion. There are, in fact, Muslim sects that are complete Pacifists. Like any religion, Islam is diverse.
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But fll too often, if you bring the topic up in conversation and you can often feel the tension in the mount in the conversation. They believe that Islam is a hostile religion, a threat to the West, oppressive to women, spread by the sword, irrational, authoritarian and expansionist, with plans to spread itself through terror and violence until it has established an Islamic Caliphate globally. They also believe it is hostile to Jews and, to a lesser extent, Christians. (It’s not really appropriate to say anti-Semitic as Arabs are Semites and Arabic a Semitic language.) All of this is true of some Muslims in some places. But it is not true of all and it is not necessarily true of the religion.

If you look at all the groups that embrace embrace the label of Christianity you will also find that there are Christian sects and denominations which believe that there will be no second coming of Jesus Christ until everyone on earth is baptized. There are also Christian denominations that believe in spreading their faith by the sword, and that it is the place of women to remain at home where they can serve their husband and take care of their children that keep coming because they cannot practice family planning.

Most importantly, for the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the West and even Muslims in the Islamic world, the place of Islam in daily life is no more than it is for the rest of us. Some pray and go to Mosque regularly, others only on special occasions, others rarely, and others a Muslims in name only. Similarly, there are people who observe different tenants of the faith. Some who fast during Ramadan every year eat pork and drink alcohol regularly, for example.

Sometimes Muslims in the West are not religious at all, but they feel a kind of group affiliation with Muslims that becomes stronger the more others treat them as different. This happened to me when I lived in Morocco. I am not religious at all, and yet I was often asked about Christianity, especially because I was a teacher. And it made me feel like a Christian, not spiritually, but culturally.

There are virtually no Muslims in the West who have any interest at all in turning any country into a Muslim nation. Indeed, if you pay attention to their statements, even fundamentalists who carry out terror attacks generally do so because they want the West out of the Muslim world and because they want to be able to practice their religion without obstruction.

In order to combat Islamic terrorism we need to understand it, and that means not confusing it with the religion. Indeed, to do so only plays into the hands of radicals, because a vote like that in Seitzerland or the mayors comments can only reinforce the view that the West is at war with Islam.