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Dave Zweifel's Plain Talk: A smear that won't die

Dave Zweifel  —  10/12/2008 7:45 am

So far -- but there's still more than three weeks to go -- none of the smear campaigns has gotten the legs of the 2004 Swift Boat slurs that somehow turned John Kerry's heroic war record into a liability.

There's one, though, that lingers out there, mostly on the Internet: that Barack Obama is really a Muslim who plans on taking over the U.S. government from within. Polls show that a significant number of Americans actually believe it.

That Obama is a Muslim -- as if that should matter anyhow in a country that prides itself in its religious freedoms -- has been debunked thousands of times, but it continues to pop up in unexpected places.

A reader of the weekly Peshtigo (Wis.) Times, for instance, dropped me an e-mail last week to report that the paper recently ran as fact another twist on the same claim.

"That's what kind of stuff we have to put up with up here," he wrote.

The item appeared in the paper's chatty "Country Cousin" column, a regular feature that comments on everything from dogs running loose in town to the best way to mix sauerkraut and mashed potatoes.

Last week, under the headline "More Politics," the anonymous columnist quotes from an obscure Web site called "arcadeathome.com" that insists Barack Hussein Obama is not really half black, but 43.75 percent Arabic and only 6.25 percent "African Negro." Further, the site claims, "Barack Hussein Obama" is not of African Swahili origin, but Arabic. His name is said to be derived from "baracka," which means "blessed" in that language. Hussein is also an Arabic name and so is Obama.

"While his father was from Kenya, his father's family were mainly Arabs and rich ones at that," Country Cousin quotes from the piece.

"Talk about a switch in attitudes," Country Cousin tells the Times' readers. "Remember when people with colored blood went to great pains to hide their ancestry? Now we seem to have an Arab busy trying to get into the White House by claiming to be Negro."

I checked out arcadeathome.com and found that it is principally a Web site where visitors can play arcade games on line. But it is liberally sprinkled with "news" on how bad a character this guy "B. Hussein Obama" is.

Meanwhile, Country Cousin could have Googled Barack Obama's ancestry and gotten hundreds of legitimate Web sources ranging from ancestry.com to the Chicago Sun-Times that have all painstakingly traced the presidential candidate's ancestry in Africa for generations and on his mother's side back to Ireland. The Sun-Times last month took what it called an exhaustive look at Obama's ancestry and found that his ancestors were born in Kenya, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

And the fact that he's a longtime Christian and took his oath of office on the Bible still doesn't deter the smear-mongers from continually spreading the "fact" that he's Muslim (and an Arab) and swore his oath on the Quran.

That some people and a newspaper columnist in 21st century Wisconsin continue to repeat this racist rubbish is a sad commentary on all too much of America these days.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times, where his column appears at captimes.com three days a week and in Wednesday's print edition.

Dave Zweifel  —  10/12/2008 7:45 am