Two critics of the Muslim religion think it's interesting that Barack Obama will not shirk from using his full name when he takes office January 20.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, the president-elect said he will follow the tradition and use his full name -- Barack Hussein Obama -- when he takes the oath of office. "I think the tradition is that they [previous presidents] use all three names, and I will follow the tradition," he said. "I'm not trying to make a statement one way or another. I'll do what everybody else does." But best-selling author Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch thinks Obama's statement is ironic in that throughout the campaign it was considered taboo to mention the Democratic candidate's middle name. "Because it was suggesting that he had some connection to Islam and to the Islamic world," says Spencer. [And] now he's exploiting the same thing. Although he says that it's only because every president uses his full name when being sworn in and he's simply going to follow that tradition, it does seem as if there's a signal being given here that there's more to it than that." Brigitte Gabriel is founder and president of ACT! for America and the author of They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It. She says Obama's background is part of his identity. "He was born to a Muslim father, raised in his early childhood as a Muslim, [and] enlisted in schools as a Muslim," says Gabriel. "There is no denying the fact that Obama at one point was a Muslim raised as a Muslim." Whether the president-elect is practicing Islam now or not, she argues, is "irrelevant."
