A few years ago, speaking in a panel discussion alongside Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer declared that it doesn’t matter if President Obama is secretly a Muslim because “if he were a secret Muslim, he wouldn’t be acting any differently.” (Franks agreed.)
Obama’s personal faith and allegiances are still apparently an open question to Spencer, who told far-right radio host Rick Wiles earlier this month that he couldn’t “argue against” Wiles’ assertion that Obama is a “jihadist.”
Spencer told Wiles that although he’s “not one of those given to conspiracy theories or thinking he’s a secret Muslim,” he does think that the president’s “upbringing” has given him a “very warmly positive view of Islam” to the point where he just might not care about “the jihad against the United States.”
“You’ve got to wonder,” he said, “does Barack Obama have, perhaps from his youth and his father and his stepfather, a very warmly positive view of Islam? I’m not one of those given to conspiracy theories or thinking that he’s secretly a Muslim, but I think that he has a very positive view of Islam, he thinks that Islam is good for societies, good for individuals, and perhaps that does come from his upbringing. And he clearly thinks that if he gives the various entities in the Islamic world what they want, that they somehow perhaps lessen the force of the jihad against the United States, or maybe he doesn’t even care about that.”
Wiles was having none of this vagueness, and declared that in his view Obama is more than just “a closet Muslim” and is in fact “a jihadist agent” who is “carrying out jihad against the United States of America.”
“I can’t argue against that,” Spencer responded. “I wouldn’t have a lot of evidence to go by, and that’s the disturbing thing.”
“If the president of the United States, if action after action and policy after policy assisted the Mafia, would, after seven years, would you conclude that he’s a Mafia agent?” Wiles asked.
“The difficulty here,” Spencer responded, “is that this is the president of the United States and it’s still very difficult to conceive of a betrayal on that scale, but if anyone has made it possible — made it, indeed, necessary — to consider that very seriously, it’s Barack Obama.”
