During the 2008 US presidential election, unfounded rumours began to circulate on the internet that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States, and was therefore not eligible for the presidency.
Mr Obama’s campaign provided plenty of evidence to refute the claims, including the candidate’s birth certificate, but the chatter has not died down, and some people have even launched lawsuits to question Mr Obama’s eligibility.
With Mr Obama now installed in the White House, the number of Americans who believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – that he is not eligible to be president, and that his birth certificate is a forgery appears to be growing.
And "birthers" – as those who doubt Mr Obama’s eligibility for the presidency are pejoratively known – have started making their presence felt within the conservative movement.
What allegations are being made about Mr Obama
The principal allegation is that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and that he is therefore ineligible to be president, according to the US constitution, which states that "no person except a natural born citizen… shall be eligible to the office of President".
It is further alleged that any documents purporting to prove Mr Obama’s eligibility are either insufficient or fraudulent.
Some of those challenging Mr Obama’s eligibility allege that he was actually born in Kenya, or that he adopted Indonesian citizenship as an infant.
What documents have been presented proving Mr Obama’s eligibility
In June 2008, the Obama campaign – in an attempt to disprove another set of internet rumours that Mr Obama’s middle name was Muhammad -made public his birth certificate.
The document – a Certification of Live Birth – indicated that Mr Obama had been born at 7.24pm on 4 August in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Researchers have also dug up birth notices for Mr Obama printed in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1961.
The newspapers received information about births from Hawaii’s Department of Health.
Did the documents stop the rumours
No. When Mr Obama’s Certification of Live Birth was published, as a scanned document on the Obama campaign’s website, some people began to question its authenticity.
It was alleged in blog posts, chain emails and internet forums that the document did not have an official stamp or seal and that it lacked an official signature. Some even suggested that the document had been faked using picture-altering software.
Was there any substance to these allegations
No. Representatives from the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Political Fact Check projectexamined the hard copy of the documentand verified that it did in fact bear an official seal, and had been signed by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T Onaka (using a signature stamp). Both the seal and the signature were on the (unscanned) reverse of the document.
Did that put the rumours to bed
No. Although most people accepted the authenticity of the birth certificate, a new allegation emerged.
The document released by the Obama camp was a Certification of Live Birth, freshly created in 2007 by Hawaiian officials at the request of the Obama campaign, based on Hawaii’s computerised records, not the original hand-written long-form "Certificate of Live Birth", created by the hospital at the time of Mr Obama’s birth.
A Certificate of Live Birth contains more information, including the hospital name, and the name of the attending physician.
Campaigners alleged that Hawaiian law permits the issuance of Certifications of Live Births to people born abroad, and began calling on the Obama campaign to release the long-form Certificate of Live Birth, which they said would answer all of their questions.
WorldNetDaily, a website that has been at the forefront of the campaign to probe Mr Obama’s presidential eligibility, has drawn up a petition calling on Mr Obama to release the document.
Has the Certificate of Live Birth been released
It has not. But Dr Chiyome Fukino, Director of the Hawaii Department of Health, has released a statement confirming that she has "seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawai¡i State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawai¡i and is a natural-born American citizen".
And, as Janice Okubo, director of communications for the Hawaii Department of Health, explains, no-one who was born abroad could get a certificate saying they were born in Hawaii.
"If you were born in Bali, for example," Ms Okubo told the Washington Independent, "you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali. You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate."
Have campaigners attempted to air their concerns in the courts
A number of lawsuits have been filed by people who question Mr Obama’s eligibility, but all of them have been dismissed at the earliest stages.
In July, Stefan Cook, a major in the US Army Reserve who was due to be deployed to Afghanistan, filed a lawsuit seeking to block his deployment, on the grounds that his orders were invalid, because President Obama was ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief. His case was dismissed.
Have any mainstream politicians endorsed the campaigners’ views
Most Republicans have rejected the claims, but Alan Keyes, a former Republican presidential candidate, has filed a lawsuit questioning Mr Obama’s eligibility, and Republican Senator James Inhofe has said he does not "discourage" the movement.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Martin Amis’s Iran fantasia
Amis’s understanding of Iran is shallow and his take on Islamism superficial. Is this the best western liberalism has to offer?
Some 20-odd years ago, not out of any sense of patriotism or self-defence, young Iranians with bombs strapped to them dived under advancing Iraqi tanks. Khomeini promised them a few dozen virgins you see. Now, as Martin Amis tells us today, that evil genius’s followers, hungrier than ever, are combining apocalyptic zeal with advanced nuclear engineering to usher in the Messiah, destroy western civilisation, and kill every remaining Iranian who isn’t a mullah or mindless fanatic.
The myth that madness has motivated Muslims throughout 1,400 years of history and continues to drive political Islam today is a pretty old one, and I must say it is getting rather boring, so it’s especially hard to understand how a figure as prolific as Martin Amis can still make a good living out of it. Nonetheless, it seems that Amis is again ready to wear the fashionable Islam expert hat, this time gracing us with his profound insights on Iran, which even if dead wrong are at least momentarily entertaining.
Amis obviously shouldn’t take up political forecasting as a second career. Consider his phrase ” … what we seem to be witnessing in Iran is the first spasm of the death agony of the Islamic Republic.” But haven’t we had this “first spasm” before? When the Mujahideen-e Khalq blew up the offices of the Islamic Republican party taking out the entirety of Khomeini’s vanguard? Or when the old fellow finally died? Or the student protests in 1999? No, really, this is it. Rafsanjani is leading prayers alongside Mousavi – it will all be over soon.
Amis makes the same mistake as countless others have done about the nature of the mysterious Mousavi: “Had Mousavi won, Obama would have rewarded Iran.” Is that the same Mousavi who before the election answered “the west should stop asking for the impossible” in response to a question about halting Iran’s nuclear energy programme? The same Mousavi whose website’s header boasts a portrait of Khomeini and whose every communiqué calls for a reclamation of the Islamic revolution?
Amis’s historical naivety is also noteworthy: “The 1979 revolution wasn’t an Islamic revolution until it was over … it was a full-spectrum mass movement, an avalanche of demonstrations and riots.” True, but it is rather curious, then, that decades of communist and nationalist resistance, not to mention the thousands abducted and murdered by the Shah’s secret police only drew out the masses after the megalomaniac sent his forces to the dusty city of Qom to beat up a few kids at a religious school and then kicked an old cleric out of the country.
Among the more sinister schemes in Amis’s essay is his narrative history of the soul of “one of the most venerable civilisations on earth … divided between Xerxes and Muhammad.” Nothing could sound worse than an English writer in the 21st century defining the essence of a foreign people in this monolithic way. With the same impulse for reduction and sheer negligence he manages to completely mistake Khomeini’s participation in a centuries-old Sufi poetic tradition that analogises spiritual ecstasy with material intoxication for some kind of repressed Persian angst. Even my own undergraduate students don’t make that mistake.
But more troubling than the follies of a novelist turned pundit is that Amis’s hyperbole represents the sad way in which the liberal intellectual tradition reacts to the challenge of a viable alternative to its secular humanist hegemony. In that vein, Amis’s comments on Iran must be seen as part of a growing intellectual reaction that in the face of decades of rising Muslim political power seems capable only of producing stomach-churning multicultural apologists or Islamophobic ideologues.
Finding the real explanations to the events in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, where political-religious experiments unfold in dozens of contexts daily, requires first interrogating our own myths and superstitions. Reason, democracy, independent thinking, and human rights – timeless universals or complex socio-historical constructions? Only then one might proceed to understand the ways in which secularism and religion, reason and insanity, modernity and Islam have all been partners locked in step on the road to the present day. There is no mystery as to why secular fundamentalists like Amis look at Islamism through the lens of the Protestant reformation – the sight of a religiously-inspired alternative to secular materialism would make a mockery of the last few hundred years of European history.
Any attempt at getting it right would also require recognising that Muslim projects in Islamism are being carried out not by medieval zombies turned contemporary robots but by real, breathing people who happen to be motivated by the same feelings of fear, dignity, rage, and hope that stir the rest of humanity. I, perhaps naively, ask at least this minimum from anyone in a position of influence who wants to talk seriously about Islam and the Muslim world.
That Amis shares the paranoid alarmism of Netanyahu and his foreign minister and is one of many suppliers of the discursive fodder needed for 21st century Euro-American imperialism is not the truly disturbing issue here. Nor is the fact that Amis has given us nothing more than false consciousness with which to understand the truly frightening world around us. More troublesome is that at this profound juncture in human history, one of liberalism’s greatest sons can do no better than to respond in this fearful, superficial way.