I mentioned on Monday the President's first visit to church since last spring and intimated that it was related to his desperate need for an image burnishment for the electioneering ahead of him this next 6 weeks.Well, it turns out that there may have been another reason, one that the press has managed to keep irresponsibly silent about.
At the liberal St. John’s Episcopal Church where the First Family decided to attend services last Sunday (only the 3rd time he has been in church this year), there was a guest speaker scheduled, a well-known Washington figure whose presence would certainly have been known by President Obama.
That guest speaker was Dr. Ziad Asali, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, the founder and president of the American Task Force on Palestine. Asali spoke on “Prospects of the Two-State Solution in the Middle-East.”
Hmm. The first time in months that the President goes to church is a morning that a Muslim speaker is also on the program? Given Team Obama's harsh response to opinion polls showing that many Americans believe that the President is a Muslim and not a Christian as he claims, wasn't this an astoundingly dumb idea? Or perhaps was it sheer chutzpah?
Whatever it was, the American people were not given the chance to ponder. For the news coverage blacked out Dr. Asali's presence completely. It was in none of the network TV coverage. I repeat, none. Nor did the brief story in the U.S. News and World Report inform us of this eminently newsworthy fact. This even though the whole spin of their article was that Obama's church attendance was perhaps countering those opinion polls reflecting a quarter of the American citizenry think the President is a Muslim.
Any professional reporter (any objective observer even) would have thus pointed out the glaring irony that the church was featuring a speaker that morning who was, in fact, a real Muslim. But not the U.S. News and World Report.
And not the L.A. Times story. And not the AP story. And not the CNN story. And not the Politico story. And not the Chicago Sun-Times story. And not the Reuters story. And not the USA Today story.
You getting the picture here?
No, Americans could only discover this obviously important, critically relevant fact from this British newspaper and this Israeli newspaper.
Protecting the President is supposed to be the responsibility of the Secret Service. But in Barack Obama's case, the mainstream media has signed onto the duty as well.
