The Fix

New York City educator Debbie Almontaser was, according to the New York Times, forced to step down from her position as founding principal of the Kahlil Gibran International Academy public school, before it even opened. It was her dream that the school could mold a curriculum that would serve a broad cross-section of NYC kids and produce graduates fluent in Arabic and with a clearer understanding of the Middle East and Islam, so as to be prepared and qualified to go forth, as “ambassadors of peace and hope,” and bridge the ever-widening chasm that separates East from West.

Almontaser, a Yemen-born, New York-bred Muslim, tendered her resignation in the wake of a deliberate smear job by a New York Post reporter who artfully misused her words, quoting her out of context and omitting qualifying clauses from her statements that mitigated what the Post presented as militant rhetoric.

Daniel Pipes, director of the self-described “think tank,” Middle East Forum, a conservative watch dog group with their eye trained on Muslims, sees Almontaser’s efforts at the Gibran school as part of a long-con strategy of Muslims to promote radical ideals through “soft” jihad. Pipes contends that Muslims are slowly and, more importantly, lawfully infiltrating, at a molecular level, all facets of American society. Pipes fears Muslims with radical leanings are operating under the radar and are ultimately intending to impose sharia law in the United States.

Whereas Pipes might view Barack Obama as a potential Manchurian Candidate type of un-witting operative, a less savvy group of fear mongers began work in January smearing “Barack Hussein Obama” by planting seeds of dread via a chain e-mail that claims that Obama is a closet “radical” Muslim extremist. The email reminds us that “the Muslims” endeavor to destroy America and that one of them in the White House would certainly accelerate their affecting that end.

What if Barack Obama is Muslim? He certainly chose a strange route along which to run for president. You would think a Muslim extremist mole would at least come up through the Republican Party to take us off of the scent for a while longer. But no, this crafty underhanded bastard has risen to the precipice of prominence as a radical reform Democrat. That’s “reverse psychology,” where you hide in plain sight and so forth. More diabolical still, as a college student, Obama changed his name from Barry back to his original christening, Barack. Damn, he’s good.

Who would suspect a guy of East African heritage with an African surname and a middle name identical to the family name of an infamous Islamic dictator of being Muslim? The length of exacting calculation to which this man and his cabal of coup d’etat hopefuls must have gone is horrifying to contemplate. But, the most daring and paradigm-inverting tactic that he has employed thus far has been to speak at length on the subject of race at a critical juncture of a tightly contested bid for his party’s nomination.

He had to do something to divert the scrutiny of the press from his glaring Muslim-ness and steer the focus toward a safer subject. So this cunning operator presented himself as someone who comes from a culture and community that struggles with its own conflicted sentiments toward the white race in general.

The 9/11 Truth-ers and Loose Change folks–the people promulgating the notion that the Bush administration, in cahoots with World Trade Center ownership, blew up the WTC themselves and blamed it on al Qaeda as an excuse to wage war on Iraq, or some such business–never saw this one coming. The only problem with the Loose Change theory is that Cheney and Co. quite obviously needed no complex and impossible-to-pull-off conspiracy in order to go to war. They just told some lies to buy some time, sent in the troops, were found out in their lies, and re-elected. Where is the necessity for an intricate conspiracy plot in all that? Here’s the conspiracy you fricking yahoos, it’s not this president who is doing al Qaeda’s bidding, it is the next president who is a secret Muslim.

If Obama gets to the White House, is he going to blow up his own crib, family, flat-screened TV, and his own ass, like some crass suicide bomber? If your goal is to assassinate the leader of the free world does it make you re-think your plans if you are the leader of the free world? Or, would he quietly wait it out through two terms of molding the new Great Society and, after he’s out of office, with his full compliment of Secret Service entourage in tow, pass the floor plans of the White House, along with lists of security pass codes and descriptions of secret handshakes to some thickly-bearded guy in a turban on a bridge in Ankara or Damascus?

What if they are right about him being Muslim but wrong about him being “extreme”? What if he’s just a regular old Muslim, like five or six of my neighbors? Most are single mothers who I rarely see or hear anything out of unless they are coming from or going to one of their multiple jobs. Directly across the street from me is an African-American Muslim bachelor who drives a fairly new pick-up truck. There is often a lot of foot traffic in and out of his house. But it’s mostly just the white work crews he regularly hires to lay tile and frame walls. He’s remodeling his house. Pretty scary.