Obama said yesterday, according to the official White House transcript (thanks to Hillel Stavis):
Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims [sic] Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.
As I noted here, this was a very, very strange statement. It is not remotely true that “if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Indonesia has 200 million Muslims; India has 156 million Muslims; Pakistan has over 150 million Muslims. The United States, according to the Pew Research Center, has 2.3 million Muslims. Even if one accepts the wildly inflated figures favored by Islamic advocacy groups in the U.S., that only brings the number up to 6 or 7 million.
So where did Obama get this crazy idea?
Maybe from Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN). This morning Melanie Phillips sent me this: “Has America Become an Islamic Country?,” by Saad El Deen Ibrahim, a translation by Asmaa Sharaf El Deen of an article from Egypt’s Al-Masry al-Youm for Watching America, May 9. It contains an account of a speech Ellison gave at the annual congress of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID) on May 5. It says that Ellison says this:
All this talk about America’s relationships with the Islamic world undeniably indicates how America will become a part of the Islamic world. This is especially evident now, when the number of American Muslims exceeds six million. This is more than the entire population of the 11 countries which are members of the organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the same organization which must call America to join (and here, the hall was swept by thunderous applause).
There are 57 members of the OIC, not eleven. Maybe Ellison said that the Muslim population of the U.S. was larger than that of eleven OIC members — that would at least make sense as a claim.
Did Obama get his wild assertion from Ellison? If so, why didn’t it ring false for this learned man, so expert in his knowledge of Islam and the Islamic world? Wherever he got it, why didn’t he do some basic fact-checking?
Note also that Ellison wants the U.S. to join the OIC, the chief enemy of free speech in the world today.