President Obama, Put Down That Quran!

Now, as I’ve said before, I watch the news all the time.  It’s a social activity.  And watching this whole crisis concerning the shutdown and the debt ceiling has been, I must admit, entertaining.  For a change, it is nice to see white people fighting with each other instead of teaming up against us.

Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, politicos, talking heads, and journalists have been battling it out on every channel.  No Syria, no Iran, no Palestine.  It’s just white people with white people problems.  I’ve just been sitting back, putting my feet up, eating my popcorn, and watching it all unfold.  It’s been wonderful.

But my festivities were short-lived.  In Washington, DC this past Sunday, a group of conservatives held a rally, expressing their anger at President Obama for shutting down federal landmarks during the government shutdown, which, incidentally, was triggered by Republicans in the House refusing to allow a vote on a budget that would have avoided this whole thing.

The rally included high-profile Tea Partiers like former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and current Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz.  They strongly criticized President Obama, and their words were not kind at all.  As it turns out, however, they were mere amateurs compared to the next performer, Larry Klayman, the founder of the conservative advocacy group, “Freedom Watch,” which, by its own description, is dedicated to “preserving freedom.”

He started off with a bang:

We’re now ‘ruled’ by a president who bows down to Allah.

That got my attention.  Now, I am aware that a Pew study in the summer of 2012 found that 17% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim.  But I always thought that was just the 17% of Americans who live near Canada and don’t have access to electricity, automobiles, and books.  But I was wrong.  These people do have cars, and they can drive all the way to Washington, DC.

And if you don’t think 17% is that big of a number, you’re wrong too.  That’s 53 million people.  That’s twice the population of Texas.  That’s like 4 Pennsylvanias.  Or 8 Arizonas.  Or 12 Kentuckys.  Imagine if 12 Kentuckys decided to take over America.  That’s much scarier than a Muslim president.

Then came more from Klaymer:

This president is not a president of ‘We, The People.’  He is the president of ‘his’ people.

Now, I am not exactly sure what this means.  I don’t know what Klaymer meant by ‘his’ people.  Did he mean Blacks?  Or Muslims?  Or Democrats?  Or did he mean Black Muslim Democrats?  Cause that’s only like 3 elected officials.  But racists don’t discriminate in their racism.  It is sometimes hard to pin them down.

Klaymer closed with some drama:

I call upon all of you to wage a second nonviolent American revolution, with civil disobedience, to demand that this president leave town, to get out, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, to figuratively come out with his hands up.

Now President Obama, as we all know, has frequently denied that he is a Muslim.  He has done this by consistently showing up at different churches throughout Washington, DC all the time.  Like you, Mr. Klaymer, we Arabs and Muslims were hopeful that Mr. Obama was secretly a Muslim.  But we have finally come to terms with that the fact he is not.  It is time for you to do the same.  And after watching what he has done in our homelands over the past few years, we don’t want him anymore anyway.  He’s all yours.

It seems that some Americans are not satisfied with their current leader.  They cannot even tolerate a little bit of change.  After a long line of presidents who were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they cannot seem to accept a president like Barack Obama, who is a Black Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

And it’s time for President Obama to finally respond.  The race-baiting Muslim haters are not stopping.  The president needs to take them on directly and say, “Yes, I am not a Muslim.  But what would it matter if I were?”  It is not enough to continue simply assuming that these people are too dumb to have a following.  They do.

So, there we were, once again making it into a news story that really had absolutely nothing to do with us.  But as Mr. Klaymer knows all too well, when you have run out of arguments to make your case, Islamophobia is always a dependable tool.  It gets people to cheer you on.  No one will join you in your “second nonviolent American revolution” if you ask them to simply because Barack Obama is a bad president.  But if you tell them if he’s a Muslim, they just might come along.