President Obama couldn’t bring himself to observe the National Day of Prayer or spend time with the Boy Scouts of America, but God forbid, he couldn’t miss the Muslim Iftar Ramadan dinner, or pass up a chance to praise an Islamic center a stone’s throw away from Ground Zero.

He later backed down — a bit.

One has to wonder exactly who is this Barack Obama? Is he the Muslim-educated student who has repeatedly proclaimed his Christian beliefs while finding himself unable to put a foot in a Christian church in Washington he can call his own, or is he an adult still motivated by the Muslim faith he learned and practiced as a young man?

This is a serious question, especially since Obama has gone out of his way to befriend a community, many of whom bear a deep hatred for the United States and a fanatical belief in the inevitability of supremacy of Islam over the United States.

Daniel Pipes writes that the Muslim population in this “country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people who desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam.”

He cites the case of Siraj Wahaj, a black convert to Islam and the recipient of some of the American Muslim community’s highest honors, who in June 1991 had the privilege of becoming the first Muslim to deliver the daily prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A little over a year later, addressing an audience of New Jersey Muslims, the same Wahaj said that “if only Muslims were more clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.

Said Wahaj: “If we were united and strong, we’d elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us.”

This is “the religion of peace”?

Writing in the August 5 Washington Times, Jeffery T. Kuhner warns that the decision to build a 13-story mosque and Muslim cultural center 600 feet from the site of Ground Zero represents the surrender of the United States to radical Islam.

He insists that most New Yorkers and Americans do not want this mosque erected and warns that it will be “a symbolic monument to the triumph of Islamism in the Unites States.”

Kuhner notes that the attacks on 9/11 were “committed by Muslim extremists in the name of holy war against the West… [using] the Koran and Islamic principles to justify their actions.” Their ultimate goal, he warns, is “to impose a world Muslim empire based on Shariah law.”

“Ground Zero,” he explains, “is where the war came home to America,” and supporters of the mosque project push forward to make sure “the mosque will cast a giant, dark shadow over Ground Zero,” a constant reminder of Islam’s victory.

“If Islamism can impose its will near the site of Sept. 11, then it can impose its will anywhere.”

Unfortunately, it appears that Islam is also imposing its will and casting a shadow over the Obama White House.

Mike Reagan is the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan and is president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.