Surprise! President Barack Obama Told Al Arabiya TV ‘I Have Lived in Muslim Countries’ (Plural)

I want to know the names of any and all Muslim countries in which President Barack Obama has lived. After all, as he told an Al Arabiya interviewer Monday night, he has lived in more than one.

In a post yesterday, I brought to light the fact that he had responded to a question from Al Arabiya TV’s Hisham Melhem by saying, “I have lived in Muslim countries.”

Last time I checked, “countries” was the plural version of the word, “country.” The phrase, “Muslim countries,” therefore, indicates more than one Muslim country. Last time I checked, Indonesia was a single, solitary and sovereign country. And so I press on.

Twenty-four hours after publishing my post about President Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya TV, I wondered whether any of my colleagues in the mainstream news media had yet seen fit to pursue a similar line of questioning. To satisfy my curiosity, I ran a Google News Advanced Search.

After typing “Obama” in the space next to “All the Words” and “Muslim countries” in the space next to “Exact Phrase,” I narrowed the time parameter of my search to the past week and hit “Enter.” The search produced 532 results.

In perusing articles that appeared in the 50 most-recent results, none of the writers — not at the World Tribune, Foreign Policy, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times and not Reuters, Chicago Tribune, Charleston Daily Mail or TimesOnline — had dared to raise a question about whether Obama lived in any Muslim country other than Indonesia.

Unbelievably, the statement — “I have lived in Muslim countries” — by President Obama has been ignored by the world’s journalists.

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