THE DAILY BLADE: Obama In Saudi Arabia: Two Heads Of Muslim Nations Meet, Sip Coffee
President Barack Obama met with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, this time, he did not bow (video) obsequiously before the Muslim king – at least not physically: “I thought it was very important to come to the place where Islam began and to seek his majesty's counsel and to discuss with him many of the issues that we confront here in the Middle East.” As leaders of Muslim nations, Obamah and Abdullah have a lot in common.
Whatcha talkin’ about, Willis?
Let The Stiletto explain: In his first interview with the French press on Monday Obama tells Canal Plus reporter Laura Haim: “[I]f you actually took the number of Muslims Americans [sic], we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”
Well, that set off The Telegraph’s Toby Harnden (“[I]mplicitly contrasting himself with the born-again, evangelical Bush who pursued a post-9/11 ‘crusade’ against terrorism, Obama is presenting himself to the Islamic world as the personification of a new, tolerant - and, yes, partly Muslim - America.) and launched a furious round of fact-checking by bloggers - but not by The New York Times.
Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel cites a Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey conducted between May 8 and August 13, 2007 that found Muslims make up 0.6 percent of the U.S. population – which she calculates as translating to just 1.8 million Muslims.
But the fine print on the chart she includes in her post clearly attributes this data to a previous Pew survey, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” which pegged the total U.S. Muslim population at 2.35 million, a figure that includes native-born Muslim converts (a group that has been in the news lately). According to another estimate, there are between five and eight million Muslims in the U.S.
Still, according to these various figures being bandied about, the U.S. would either be the 34th largest Muslim country in the world (if the U.S. population is as high as 6 million) or tied with Eritrea as the 46th largest (if the U.S. population is as low as 2.35 million), according to NationMaster, from which Harnden gets his stats.
There’s only one explanation for the discrepancy between what Obama told the French reporter and the Pew Research Center data: The survey must have been limited to 50 out of our 57 states (video), thus omitting the huge concentration of Muslims living in these seven states.
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