Barack Obama's "apostasy" is not the problem. His campaign has stated that. he never considered himself to be a Muslim. Those who keep harping on the notion that he was once a Muslim at or around the age of ten, and that he must admit to this, are setting themselves up for ridicule. What is worrisome is not that he was once a Muslim, or still more absurdly, considered to be a "secret Muslim," but that he is ignorant of Islam, and has not made any effort to investigate it, and may be sentimental about it, based on personal history: his desire to identify with his absentee Kenyan father,  the fact that his mother's second husband was also a Muslim; his childhood experience in Indonesia, which may make him think he knows something about Islam but was as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative an experience of Islam as was that "experience of Islam" that a much older, but not wiser, Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz had when he was the American ambassador in Indonesia, not understanding what Islam was about, and taking his experience there -- with everyone trying to woo and win him ("yes, we really hope to establish diplomatic relations with Israel"), and the naiveté about Islam was not undone but reinforced, by his Arab girlfriend, no doubt a lady with all the right intentions, but who was herself a would-be reformer or tamer of Islam, who in that very role offered false hopes, and herself misrepresented the meaning, and menace, of Islam.

The problem with Barack Obama's supposed Muslim connection is that he has not shown any inclination to ponder the nature of Islam at its essence, and not in the modified unrepresentative form in which he may have, fleetingly and personally, encountered it. And a greater problem is a lack of historical knowledge, and a naiveté (without the viciousness) about the world that rivals that of Jimmy Carter, and a trust in such obviously disturbing "advisers" as the vicious, and naively realpolitiking, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

There's plenty to worry about with Barack Obama and his more-than-sufficient display, so far, of all the wrong foreign-policy instincts, including his dreamy belief that meeting and talking, with representatives of Iran (what could be the harm in merely meeting and talking? say some). The harm could be great. It would justify, it would dignify, it would  give a boost in the minds of its own disaffected subjects, to the Islamic Republic of Iran. it would encoil us in useless, protracted discussions with those who are past masters at deception and deliberate delay, and who treat such meetings not as occasions for the exchange of views that we are expected to believe have not already, and repeatedly, been exchanged, but rather as instruments of war, the propaganda war that Muslims engage in, and we, alas, do not.