After a question by O’Reilly about the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in transitioning a government for Egypt, Luntz began to ask the Iowa Republicans why the meters showed them all having such a negative reaction to Obama’s answers.

One woman said she believed the president’s religious convictions guide his policies. When Luntz asked her to clarify, she said, “I believe that he is a Muslim.”

Luntz then asked the rest of the group how many believed Obama is Muslim. About a dozen, or nearly half, raised their hands.

“Now do you understand the implications of what you’re saying here,” Luntz began to ask. “What the media’s going to say about this group and about the Iowa Caucus voters in the future. Do you realize what you’re opening up here?”

After that comment, several other members of the focus group said they believed Obama’s religious belief is “liberalism,” which they said was “the most intolerant of all.”

The president is of course Christian, but some of the Republicans said they did not believe him.

This isn’t the first time Iowa has garnered headlines for questions about the president’s faith. Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s three representatives on the Republican National Committee, was criticized last summer when she publicly questioned the president’s religion. In response, several prominent Iowa Republicans sounded off, with state Sen. Sandy Greiner saying she respects the point of view of anyone who says the president is a Muslim.

Gov. Terry Branstad said at the time that he would take the president at his word that he’s a Christian.

Luntz’ panels have been criticized as seeming too far right to be an accurate representation of any segment of the US population. The Pulitzer-prize winning website PolitiFact said Luntz coined the “Lie of the Year” in 2010, with the phrase “government takeover of health care.”

Luntz previously complained his airtime had been cut on Fox because his findings didn’t comport with the outlet’s orthodoxy, resulting from focus groups he conducted that ended up favoring Obama.

Also, on cable Monday night, on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell concluded O’Reilly had interupted the president 43 times during the interview.

Whole letter after the jump.

Jihad at Fort Hood

Every American this morning should be outraged not only about the murderous rampage against U.S. soldiers in Ft. Hood, Texas, by Major Nidal M. Hasan, but also by the sickening effort of Big Media, and even some U.S. officials, to deceive us about what has taken place.

For eight years we have been fighting radical Islamists around the world, and we have been the victims of jihadist attacks by lone radical Muslims repeatedly here in the U.S. Yet as the story broke of the carnage yesterday, 13 dead and 30 wounded, virtually every major media outlet, along with our own government, seemed to have as their main goal convincing us that the event had nothing to do with terrorism or radical Islam.

But minute-by-minute, more information is coming to light that can’t be ignored. We have found out that six months ago Major Hasan may have defended Muslim suicide bombers on his web page, comparing such acts to the sacrifice a U.S. solider makes when he falls on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers. Col. Terry Lee, who worked with the killer, said Major Hasan had said, “Muslims shouldn’t be fighting Muslims.” Back in June, when a Muslim convert assassinated a U.S. soldier at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, Col. Lee said that Major Hasan seemed happy about the event and that he was confronted by other officers. (You may recall that it took days for Obama to acknowledge that attack, yet the White House issued a rare Sunday statement when late-term abortionist George Tiller was killed.)

In recent weeks, while off the base, Major Hasan started wearing Arabic and religious clothing. He passed out Korans on the morning of the shooting. Survivors in the facility where Major Hasan went on the attack reported that he yelled, “Allahu Akbar,” (Allah is great) before he opened fire – the same words shouted by the jihadists on 9/11 and which have been repeated by our enemy in every attack since.

Nor is this an isolated incident. In June 2003, Sergeant Hasan K. Akbar attacked his fellow soldiers as they gathered in Kuwait to start the liberation of Iraq. He killed two officers and wounded many more. Numerous plots by American Muslims have been uncovered in recent years to attack Fort Dix, the Quantico Marine Corps base and other military facilities.

No one is suggesting that an Al Qaeda operative contacted Major Hasan and ordered yesterday’s attack. But the evidence certainly indicates that Major Hasan was becoming more and more committed to radical Islam and growing increasingly hostile to the American military that paid for his education and repeatedly promoted him. NPR reports, “Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work… He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues…”

I understand the media’s politically correct mindset. What is inexcusable is why the military and the FBI continue to be so reticent about acknowledging the nature of the enemy we are confronting. Instead of going into denial, our military, the FBI and other intelligence agencies need to admit the obvious. While thousands of loyal American Muslims have served in the military, and some have died with other Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are also “sleeper cells” or “sleeper individuals” who are jihadist ticking time bombs inside our own ranks. Similar attacks are inevitable the longer our leaders engage in self-deception. The brave men and women in uniform, who are on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq, should not have to worry about being killed at home by the same enemy they are fighting abroad.

Obama’s “Shout out”

As details of the Ft. Hood carnage poured in yesterday afternoon, the White House announced that President Obama would make a statement at a previously scheduled event. Close to 5:00 PM, cable stations switched to cover the president’s remarks as he was getting ready to speak at a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Interior Department. What happened next has callers to talk radio shows all over the country outraged.

Instead of bringing a somber demeanor into the room, the president seemed to many to be light-hearted and frivolous. He thanked various staffers, and then said he wanted to give a “shout out” to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, who he incorrectly identified as a “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner. After several minutes of banter, the president read a somber, brief statement about the shootings. Increasingly, this White House seems “tone deaf.” How hard is it to realize that this was not a time for joking or “shout outs.” In fact, it would have been more appropriate to cancel the speech and make a reassuring statement from the White House on the events in Texas.

This morning, the president made another statement ordering flags to fly at half-staff until Veterans Day. But he also cautioned us not to “jump to conclusions” until we have all the facts. (The last time there was a pending law enforcement issue, the president was the first to jump to conclusions when he said the Cambridge Police Department “acted stupidly” for arresting his friend Professor Louis Gates.)

“I don’t belong to any such group,” Stupak said. “I rent a room at a house in ‘C Street.’ I do not belong to any such group. I don’t know what you’re talking about, [The] Family and all this other stuff.”

The Messenger also spoke with Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine who lived with The Family at another house and wrote a tell-all book about the group. Sharlet said he doesn’t buy Stupak’s proclaimed ignorance of the organization’s activities.

“When I lived with The Family at Ivanwald, a house for younger men being groomed for leadership, I was told that Stupak was a regular visitor to the Cedars,” Sharlet said. The Cedars is yet another compound owned by The Family, one that hosts weekly prayer events led by former Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese.

Sharlet said that Stupak had much greater involvement with the group than he is admitting, noting that the congressman was “a Family-assigned mentor to one of my brothers at Ivanwald.” That Ivanwald resident, Sharlet said, “regularly left for what he and others described as mentoring sessions.”

Another reason to doubt Stupak’s denials, Sharlet said, is that members of the organization and those who live at the C Street house are sworn to secrecy about what goes on there, as fellow resident Zach Wamp admitted to the Knoxville News in the wake of the recent scandals. That makes such denials less credible, Sharlet said.

You can read the full story at The Michigan Messenger.

The Associated Press asks prominent evangelicals and leaders of the religious right if Jesus would condone torture. Some evangelicals say every life is sacred and torture is not peaceful and therefore incongruent with Christian teachings. But religious right leader Gary Bauer says that while Jesus wouldn’t torture, he would permit his followers to do so.

“There are a lot of things Jesus wouldn’t do because he’s the son of God,” Bauer told the AP. “I can’t imagine Jesus being a Marine or a policeman or a bank president, for that matter. The more appropriate question is, ‘What is a follower of Jesus permitted to do?’”

“I think if we believe the person we have can give us information to stop thousands of Americans from being killed, it would be morally suspect to not use harsh tactics to get that information,” Bauer said.

–

Andy Birkey is a reporter for TWI’s sister site, The Minnesota Independent.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

Within hours of the news that President Barack Obama would give the commencement address to this year’s graduates of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., angry opponents of the decision founded a new Website, NotreDameScandal.com, where they could register their complaints and sign a petition asking the school to “halt this travesty.”

“Notre Dame has chosen prestige over principles, popularity over morality,” reads the petition. “Whatever may be President Obama’s admirable qualities, this honor comes on the heels of some of the most anti-life actions of any American president, including expanding federal funding for abortions and inviting taxpayer-funded research on stem cells from human embryos.” Within days, tens of thousands of people had signed on.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“Virtually every media story for the first few weeks of this scandal cited our site and our petition,” said Patrick Reilly, the president and founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, in an interview with TWI. “There’s tremendous outpouring of support for the students who are opposing this outrage at Notre Dame. Some of them have said they’ll have nothing to do with Notre Dame if this goes forward.”

After eight years of only occasional disagreements with a Republican president, conservative Catholic activists have moved into the trenches to oppose Obama. They cite his repeal of the Mexico City rule, or “global gag rule” that banned providing federal money to international groups that promote or provide abortions, his stem cell compromise, and his cabinet nominees like Kathleen Sebelius, the pro-choice governor of Kansas, to argue that he is the most pro-abortion rights politician ever to ascend to the job. They are bolstered by new media outlets and organizations that did not exist at their current strength in 2000, the last time Catholics had to contend with a pro-choice president. At the same time, they’re encouraged by a series of high-profile statements from church leaders on political morality–including the 2004 declarations by bishops that they would deny communion to then-presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Pope Benedict XIV’s 2005 speech attacking the “dictatorship of relativism.” A small number of conservative groups, and a more newsworthy group of conservative bishops — 42 so far — are turning the Notre Dame speech into a watershed moment, while obscuring the fact that the president enjoys majority support from Catholics.

Reilly’s efforts have served as a window into the movement. The Cardinal Newman Society is recognized as the key advocate for conservative values at Catholic universities, but it is a relatively small organization. Reilly is one of seven employees of the group, loosely affiliated with the conservative Media Research Center, whose president L. Brent Bozell III serves on the Cardinal Newman Society’s board of directors. According to tax records filed in 2007, the organization runs on less than $1 million per year. The NotreDameScandal site itself is a modest project, using the exact same design, and same stock photos, as the Cardinal Newman Society’s own page. Nonetheless, the effort has put the group in the news and garnered more than 350,000 signatures. It’s bolstered claims that the group represents ersatz Catholic opinion, which wants Obama to cancel his speech and Father John Jenkins, president of the university, to apologize or step aside.

“I haven’t seen polling on this issue,” Reilly said, “but if you see them you have to do some parsing and ask: Are these faithful Catholics who are attending mass and living faithful to Catholic teachings? Among faithful, church-going Catholics there’s been tremendous support for our efforts. A lot of Catholic groups are dealing with the fact that Catholics across the United States have drifted and they need to take a stand.”

By defining the stakes in the Notre Dame fight, conservative Catholics are able to overcome two hurdles–the president’s popularity with Catholics nationally and Notre Dame students in particular. The piece of evidence most often cited to prove the president’s “Catholic problem” is a March 2009 Pew Research poll that revealed a steep drop in the president’s approval numbers among self-identified Catholics since the inauguration. But the poll gave the president a 59-28 favorable rating among all Catholics and a 47-41 rating among white, non-Hispanic Catholics. An April Pew poll gave the president high marks from Catholics on his handling of stem cell research, a decision that involved Catholic advisers. Obama carried Indiana in 2008 by a slim margin that included a win in St. Joseph County — which contains Notre Dame — and a win among Notre Dame students, who also picked Obama over McCain in a pre-election poll .

“Catholics are a diverse group of people,” said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Center for Religion and the Press, explaining the poll. “There’s been a decline in Obama’s numbers that’s not too far out of step with his decline overall. The rest of this, a lot of this, is internal politics between conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics.”

For Deal Hudson, the president of InsideCatholic.com, and a political guru who directed Catholic outreach for President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, that analysis missed the mark. “When you are trying to get the Catholic vote,” he said, “the first thing on the table is getting a speaking engagement at Notre Dame. I know. I’ve been there! The Obama political team did this and, I’m sure, expected some kind of backlash, but nothing like the watershed moment that this has turned into.”

The “watershed moment” has been heavily debated in Catholic magazines and web sites–World, Inside the Vatican, Catholic World News, LifeNews.net, the New Oxford Review–which have flowered over the last few years and which have aggressively covered the Obama decisions that have most upset conservative Catholics. The minor story of Georgetown covering up the monogram “IHS,” meaning “Jesus,” to make room for the staging of an Obama speech, has been aggressively covered. CNSNews.com–which, like the Cardinal Newman Center, is directed by L. Brent Bozell–published an enterprise piece asking whether the president would agree to wear the official robes at Notre Dame, since they are threaded with a prayer.

“Blogs can keep issues alive in a way that wasn’t possible before,” said George Neumayr, the editor of Catholic World Report, a conservative weekly. “The bishops are bombarded with complaints because of of the activity level of blogs and the ease with which people can contact the chancery. A bishop who’s receiving 1,000 messages is more likely to come out and at least make a statement about the most anti-Catholic president in modern history.”

The biggest problem for conservative Catholics has not been getting the Obama speech portrayed in the press as a scandal, but in distancing from some of the people trying to take ownership of the outrage. Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist who converted to Catholicism in 2006, has moved temporarily to South Bend to mount protests against the school. Reilly, Neumayr and others accused Terry of being a trouble-maker and self-promoter whose effort–more than 30 full-time agitators, 50,000 letters to alumni that include postcards depicting dead fetuses, bringing fringe political candidate Alan Keyes to speak, and planning a rumored “alternate commencement for Notre Dame Heroes”–makes them look fringe. In an interview Terry said that American bishops were “directly responsible for Obama’s election” because they hadn’t spoken out against him politically. “The fabric of Notre Dame’s treachery was woven by American bishops,” said Terry, who also called Georgetown University “a house of political harlotry” for allowing Obama and Vice President Biden to speak there.

Terry laughs when the worries of other conservative Catholics are read back to him. “How can they delude themselves to think this war can be won in cyberspace?” he asked. “I always tell people that petitions are no more than a fundraising mechanism to gather your name and raise money from you. They’re scams. For them to say I shouldn’t be on the ground shows they are not culture warriors. If Martin Luther King had taken the advice of the Cardinal Newman Society, black people still be riding in the back of the bus.”

Catholic supporters of the president are trying to weather the storm and dispute the idea that Obama has a “Catholic problem.” Douglas Kmiec, a former Notre Dame professor and constitutional legal counsel to Ronald Reagan who endorsed Obama and published the election tract “Can A Catholic Support Him?” argued that Reagan had been met by protests when he gave his celebrated 1981 commencement speech. “No one thought,” said Kmiec, “that when Reagan came to accept his honorary degree he’d engage in a symposium where a bishop would give him the evangelium vitae on capital punishment, or the early draft of pastoral letter of American bishops on reducing nuclear weapons.”

Kmiec characterized much of the Notre Dame talk as politicized and unrepresentative of what Catholics think, especially the activity of Newt Gingrich, who became a Catholic this year.

“For Newt Gingrich to say, as a latter-day Catholic, that this president has ignored Catholic issues, means that he needs to go back to adult religious education class to learn more deeply about the social justice elements that he probably missed,” Kmiec said. “The notion that this president is not in line with those sentiments is not befitting of the former speaker, who was a former scholar, and who I admire as someone who normally has creative ideas.”

I wrote a book called ‘Religion of Peace’ — which [Little Green Footballs' Charles] Johnson wrote a favorable review of — and I looked, and didn’t find, Christian extremists who were trying to replace the Constitution with Biblical law. They’re a myth. They’re the Santa Claus of the left.

He did say this, but he added the caveat that there are Christian activists who want to institute Biblical law through legal means, and who are extreme, but not terrorists.

The people they invoke are the Christian reconstructionists like [R.J.] Rushdooney, but if you read them they’re open about their agenda. It’s not secret. And they say that they want to bring back Biblical law using Constitutional means.

I didn’t want to get into the weeds on this tangential issue, so I cut this, but it’s important to note that Spencer acknowledges the existence of these sorts of fringe Christian activists.