In an outrageous column in the Washington Times today, Frank Gaffney launches one of the most despicable, dishonest and underhanded attacks on President Obama following his excellent speech in Cairo last week. Many of Gaffney’s fellow ultra-right wing pro-occupation and/or Islamophobic fellow travelers have been piling on the President in a transparent effort to quell his initiative to pressure Israel on settlements as well as the Palestinians on their own Roadmap responsibilities. There has been much talk about an "unprecedented betrayal of Israel," "throwing Israel under the bus," and similar overheated rhetoric from those who would encourage Israel to continue the occupation and the settlements in spite of their own clear interest in achieving a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Gaffney, however, takes the attack a step further by declaring that, “Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America’s first Muslim president.” Obviously, if President Obama actually were a Muslim, this would not be an attack, and it is not a criticism of anyone to call them a Muslim unless one is proceeding a priori from a perspective of Islamophobic bigotry. However, since the President is a devout Christian, ascribing to him a secret adherence to another faith is indeed an insult since it suggests that President Obama is dishonest, insincere and deceptive about his most deeply held beliefs.

But even this is not enough, since Gaffney feels required to claim that the President is no less than the moral and political equivalent of Adolf Hitler. According to Gaffney, President Obama has engaged in “the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich,” because while he objected to implicitly racist comments from Gaffney’s friends during the campaign that sought to emphasize his middle name as an effort to sow fear and doubts about his Christian faith, he is now pointing to the Muslim heritage in his own family to illustrate to Muslim audiences that Islam and the Muslim identity are not incompatible with American society or values. This, for Gaffney, is Hitlerian.

The invocation of Munich is a standard feature of hysterical pro-occupation rhetoric, with any implication that Israel needs to end its occupation in its own interests and in the interest of the United States being cast as the equivalent of Chamberlain’s shameful capitulation to Hitler’s demand for the reincorporation of the Sudetenland into Germany. But for Gaffney, even this familiar if ludicrous formulation is insufficient, and Obama must be not Chamberlain, but Hitler himself. And he is Hitler because while he objected to bigoted references to his middle name for nefarious purposes during the election, he is now willing to invoke it to improve the image of the United States among Muslims for noble purposes.

And how do we know that President Obama is secretly “a Muslim?” First, Gaffney notes that, “he not only had a Kenyan father who was Muslim, but spent his early, formative years as one in Indonesia,” as if that is evidence of anything reflecting his religious affiliation. Worse still, “Mr. Obama referred four times in his speech to ‘the Holy Koran,’” which, in Gaffney’s mind, is not respectful of his audiences’ sensitivities but rather a sly revelation of his own crypto-Islamic sentiments. Gaffney also claims that, “Mr. Obama established his firsthand knowledge of Islam,” of which there was not only no evidence, but the President’s mangled pronunciations of Arabic terms referring to Muslim practices (i.e., his reference to the hijab as “the hajeeb”) suggests that he has very limited familiarity with Islam and the most basic Islamic terminology, and no familiarity whatsoever with Arabic. Gaffney objects to the fact that President Obama referred to the greatest figures of the three monotheistic faiths with “the term ‘peace be upon them,’” which he claims is a term that, “no believing Christian — certainly not one versed, as he professes to be, in the ways of Islam — would ever make.” According to Gaffney’s “logic,” to use this Islamic term of respect is to accept the Muslim understanding of Jesus as a prophet rather than “the son of God,” an obviously preposterous leap. The entirety of Gaffney’s case is that Obama had a Muslim father (actually, Obama says his father was essentially an atheist), or at least a father from a Muslim background, that he lived in Indonesia as a child, and that he spoke to a Muslim audience using respectful terms.

It would be an understatement to suggest that Gaffney is waterboarding both the facts and the President’s words to convince an audience he hopes takes a dim view of Islam that the President is, or at least may be, a secret Muslim. Gaffney underscores this point by twice stating, “it may be beside the point whether Mr. Obama actually is a Muslim.” If it is beside the point, why engage in such elaborate political contortions, bending, twisting and mangling the facts and the President’s speech to suggest precisely this ludicrously false conclusion? In fact, Gaffney knows full well that it is not beside the point, especially not for his own intended audience which he obviously trusts is animated by a grave suspicion of Islam and the Muslims, and would be horrified to learn that the United States has actually elected a Muslim president. It is also intended to suggest that President Obama is a liar who has misrepresented not only his history but also his most deeply held religious beliefs. This is a perfectly disgusting effort to play on the very Islamophobic fears that Gaffney himself has done so much to promote and turn them on a political target who is not and never has been a Muslim for cynical ideological purposes.

Moreover, because the President pledged to fight stereotyping and discrimination against Muslim Americans, Gaffney argues he somehow promised, “to promote Islam in America,” which are obviously two completely different things. Gaffney is appalled that President Obama would state that, "I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear,” presumably because this might interfere with the efforts of Gaffney and his friends to promote precisely these negative stereotypes, as he has tirelessly for many years. Gaffney is further enraged that the President, “vowed to ensure that women can cover their heads” (in fact he was speaking of covering their hair), and “pledged to enable Muslims to engage in zakat, their faith’s requirement for tithing.” In other words, a simple commitment to religious accommodation as required by the Constitution and upholding the principle of nondiscrimination on the basis of religion is offensive to Gaffney who prefers discrimination over American principles of equality before the law and religious freedom.

The most useful thing about Gaffney’s article is not just that it demonstrates how deranged some of the President’s ultra-right wing detractors have become, but that he also is forthright about his own motivation for condemning the President’s outreach to the Muslim world. Gaffney’s main problem with Obama is that the President is pushing forward with a major initiative to secure a reasonable end-of-conflict agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that involves ending the Israeli occupation. A strong supporter of both the occupation and the settlements, Gaffney derides what he calls “the hallowed two-state solution,” and insists that, “Abu Mazen’s Fatah remain[s] determined to achieve a one-state solution, whereby the Jews will be driven ‘into the sea.’" In English, we call this a lie. Gaffney knows perfectly well that the PLO recognized the state of Israel in the late 1980s, engaged in many agreements with Israel predicated on a two state, and not a one state, principle for peace, and that President Abbas has never wavered from his pursuit of a peace agreement that would allow a Palestinian state to emerge to live alongside Israel in peace and security. It is not Abu Mazen who is opposed to a two state agreement, but Gaffney and his friends who support the occupation. In their frantic anti-peace efforts, they find it necessary to systematically misrepresent the Palestinian position, falsely suggesting that most Palestinians and their national leadership are not seeking an agreement with Israel, but rather its destruction.

Although Gaffney does not mention it, I have no doubt that the line in President Obama’s speech that caused him the most heartburn was his frank statement that, “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.” This is precisely what Gaffney has done, what he will continue to do, and what he wishes the United States would do: deny Palestine’s right to exist, and insist on maximalist Israeli ambitions, preferring conflict and occupation over peace and reconciliation. Gaffney is precisely the kind of fanatical extremist – and a deeply cynical and dishonest one at that – who must be marginalized, ignored and dismissed if there is any chance of achieving peace in the Middle East in the interests of the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. President Obama is not a secret Muslim, but Frank Gaffney most certainly is an open and shameless extremist, fanatic and liar.