Over at [1] The American Thinker my friend Andrew Bostom has a helpful, wide-ranging and exhaustively researched look at Obama and Islam:

Ibn Warraq's formal childhood experience of Islam mirrored Barack Obama's -- it was no more extensive. Yet despite copious evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama has gone to great lengths to deny even a nominal childhood Muslim upbringing. These repeated, often shrill and accusatory denials are accompanied by a disturbing, if predictable silence: not once has Senator Obama celebrated the remarkable freedom of conscience he had here in America to decide in his mid to late 20s that he would practice Christianity openly, and devotedly, absent any consideration of his childhood Muslim background.

Mr. Obama has thus far squandered the unparalleled opportunity to highlight and extol a profoundly important virtue of this flawed, but still great country of ours, personified by his life story: America's singular, unwavering support for true freedom of conscience.

Surely if Obama is to live up to his followers (and his own) pretensions of being a "transformative" figure, then he should be ready to elucidate, frankly, the utter lack of freedom of conscience in the Muslim world, relative to the US; why his own life trajectory demonstrates this difference; and how the fight against global jihadism is, at its core, about the protection of this most profoundly important Western ideal. Let us hope that Obama's involvement with the 7th annual commemoration of September 11, 2001 will give him pause to reflect upon these matters, and discuss them, becoming a true "agent of change." And should Senator Obama need any further inspiration, I suggest he have a long conversation with Ibn Warraq.

Read it all.