Looking for Advice on Dealing with "Wingnuts?"

As a member of Students for Barack Obama, I have a Google News Alert that I get each day with what the MSM and blogosphere is saying about him. This morning, I saw Liberal Juan Williams Agrees With Schlussel on Obama Muslim Background. It sounded intriguing, so I decided to check it out and see what the newest development in the Obama madrassa smear was.

The blog post had a short quote from Fox commentator Juan Williams: "He comes from a father who was a Muslim. I mean, I think that given we're at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem."

I'm sure those of you who are familiar with this guy can tell me that he's not really liberal, even if he is employed by what some people like to call the National Proletariat Radio. But I'm not interested in that, because most of the article was about an article by Bill Sammon in the Washington Examiner, with Debbie's own lucid additions (with the "DS"):

Obama - whose father, stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims - explained his own first name, Barack, in "Dreams": "It means 'Blessed.' In Arabic. [DS: Plagiarized from the Hebrew, "Baruch."] My grandfather was a Muslim."
In his second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama added: "Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist."

Still, when his father, a black Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, "the family wanted a Muslim burial," Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as saying in "Dreams."

The statement put out by Obama's office last week referred to his father simply as "an atheist," without mentioning his Muslim upbringing. . . .

"During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school," [DS: the one Obama is now claiming is a "public" school] Obama wrote in "Audacity." "In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf.'

Obama's stepfather was a practicing Muslim.

"Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths," Obama recalled. . . .

"It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction," Obama recalled. "He introduced me as his son."

Although Obama wrote of "puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin's call to evening prayer," he was not raised as a Muslim, according to the senator's office. Nor was he raised as a Christian by his mother, a white American named Ann Dunham who was deeply skeptical of religion.

"Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones," Obama wrote. . . .

Obama's family connections to Islam would endure, however. For example, his brother Roy opted for Islam over Christianity, as Obama recounted when describing his 1992 wedding.

"The person who made me proudest of all," Obama wrote, "was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol."

Meanwhile, Obama remained sharply critical of what he called 'the religious absolutism of the Christian right." . . .

Obama calls the Iraq war "a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country." He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S.

"In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans … have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging," he laments. "I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

So I thought, okay. Clearly this woman is a wingnut. The comments showed that a lot of people agreed with her:

Do your homework on this guy. He's a muslim masquerading as a Christian trying to fool the American public!
His church sounds like a Christian version of The Nation of Islam! What more do we need to not let this guy near the Presidency? PS Thanks Debbie for all your great work in exposing this threat to America!

Posted by: Shawn  at January 29, 2007 10:46 PM

Two other people had already responded in ways that I would have considered:

Juan Williams is a lapdog for Fox News. But if he is a liberal, than I suggest conservatives learn something from his objectivity: stop following this stupid logic that because Sen. Obama's family background includes Islam, he's going to support terrorism against the USA!!!

Posted by: Norman Blitzer  at January 29, 2007 05:01 PM

Well..seems like you all are afraid.. afraid of your own shadows. Every day Decent Muslims give there lives fighting agaist hipocrite so called Muslims.. Every day they fight side by side US forces all around the world.. in Afghanistan, Iraq, in the Philippines, in Yemen, Saudi, Somalia, They are called traitors by extremist and "mooslims, towel heads" and other slurs by idiots like your selves. If you don't have Muslim allies you can't win. It is a very juvenile mentality to try and lump an entire religion into a category. it is more juvenile to think you can win a war with out allies. Time is closing in on bigots.. you are losing the fight.. the USA will become a very diverse country soon and the majority will no longer be racist idiots. Tic toc.. the future is here.

Posted by: future  at January 29, 2007 08:29 PM

But clearly those kind of responses, as we all know, never work with wingnuts. I decided to leave a comment. I know this might seem like a futile exercise, and much of the time it is, as Maccabee's My Six Months on Right Wing Blogs shows. It's a waste of time to deal with the people who are actively leaving the comments, but there are plenty of people who visit her site and don't leave comments. I mean, I think there are people who watch FOX because they don't know any better, right? Most of the population doesn't care about politics, and Fox's personalities can seem a lot more approachable than Wolf or KO or the dreamboat that is Anderson Cooper.

So I decided to try writing something for the lurkers to read who were having doubts about all of this, in a way that wouldn't be as repelling as I was tempted to be with my "you're all a bunch of xenophobic idiots" response:

I think that Senator Obama is now a committed Christian. Like President Bush, he went through a long period of doubt in his life in which he was nonreligious, but now he has opened his heart to Christ. He recently appeared at Rick Warren's Saddleback church with Sam Brownback, who are both committed evangelicals. I don't think Pastor Warren or Senator Brownback would have invited him if they had doubts about his faith.

In Obama's book, he said that he attended both of those schools (the Catholic one and the Muslim one -- which probably was a public school, since he was in a Muslim country) because his family was too poor to afford to send him to the American international school. I would hate to criticize Obama for this just because his family had a hard time making ends meet.

Debbie, I think there are plenty of Obama's positions that you can bring to light, instead of what seems to be a charge against a man who was unfortunate enough not to know his father. What about his Senate votes -- or even these allegations about the United Church of Christ? And it's certainly worth looking into his Muslim roots -- God knows we should never take politicians at their word -- since even the "Communist News Network" went to visit the Indonesian school and find out the truth. It must be hurtful for a man who met his father once in his life, and has spent many years trying to live as a good Christian, to hear these politically motivated charges against him. They are precisely the kind of politics that made the 90s so horrible for the American people to live through. Even if I don't vote for him because of his liberal values or his inexperience, I really like Obama's message of trying to bring people together to solve our common problems. He seems to be trying to commit his Christian values -- which I believe are sincere -- to create a new kind of politics in which the two sides don't viciously attack one another and instead try to live in brotherhood.

I didn't lie, per se. I don't directly disagree with anything that I wrote (other than the CNN reference), and I agree with every major point I made. I think it's true that we should never take politicians at their word, and even though I know that there's absolutely no truth to Obama's Muslim background, it is a legitimate concern for many people in whether or not they would vote for him. Plus, I accomplished my original goal of publishing Obama's official response in ("these are the exact kind of politics that I'm trying to change"). So I responded as if their fears were valid. Besides, if we can get the wingnuts talking about the United Church of Christ, it will stop the whole Muslim meme.

I probably won't get a positive response from this, but it certainly made me feel better. Even if no one agrees with me on the site, I feel like I stood up for the truth -- and I didn't do it in a shrill way. it's an idea that interests me:
Is this something worth pursuing?

*Note: If you pick a "different reason," it would be great if you could explain in the comments.