Sandy Rios of the American Family Association kicked off her radio show earlier this week by telling her listeners that President Obama is a Muslim and alleging that the president’s secret Islamic faith is the reason why he didn’t attend the anti-terrorism unity rally in Paris last weekend.
As indisputable proof of the president’s deception, Rios cited then-candidate Obama’s 2008 statement that he had visited 57 states in his campaign. The tired candidate may have meant to say 47 or to refer to the fact there were 57 Democratic primary/caucus contests, but Rios is pretty sure “the reason he said 57 states is because there are 57 Islamic states, just saying.” Actually, as Snopes points out, while there are the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, not all of them have a Muslim majority.
Rios also played a clip of an interview in which Obama referred to “my Muslim faith,” which in context, as Snopes explains was part of “a straightforward statement…acknowledging that Republican nominee John McCain had not specifically promulgated the false rumor that he (Obama) was a Muslim.”
“He really does not love this country enough to be its president,” she said.
Later, Rios played a compilation of Obama quotes that have already been criticized by FactCheck.org as severely edited and truncated — for example, one quote Rios used cuts out the line “I’m a Christian” from Obama’s statement, “I’m a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims” — while others are just Obama calling Iran the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” the country’s official name, and referring to the Quran as the “Holy Quran,” which President Bush also called the text.
She also played a clip from the president’s 2012 remarks at the United Nations, dropping his line about protecting images of Jesus Christ from desecration.
Rios also spoke with a caller who told her: “Obama is a lazy Muslim who hates America. He supports terrorism, he fancies himself as a dictator and I believe that he wants to turn us into a Third World Muslim nation under the iron fist of the United Nations.”
“There is no question that his sympathies are with Islam,” Rios responded. “That’s not a debatable issues…He’s putting the nation at risk and he is giving his allegiance more to the Islamic world and to the radicals than he is to his own people.”
