News

Obama Revives ‘Hussein’

Christianity Today April 8, 2009

Barack Hussein Obama is back. His full name, that is.

As he fought rumors that he is a Muslim during the campaign, supporters of Obama rarely used his full name while conservative pundits frequently used his full name.

But Obama brought back his midde name Hussein during trips to France this week, according to Jonathan Martin at Politico

On Friday, at a town hall meeting in Strasbourg, France, he made an extemporaneous comment that would have been unthinkable on a campaign where female supporters wearing headscarves were once removed from a camera shot behind the candidate.

“I think that it is important for Europe to understand that even though I’m now president and George Bush is no longer president, al-Qaida is still a threat, and that we cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK,” he told the audience.

Martin also writes that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seeming to recognize the signal that using Obama’s middle name sends, calling him “the distinguished president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.”

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