Right-wing runs with dubious claim that Obama admitted “I am a Muslim”

They just can't drop it.

A year and a half into Obama's presidency, the far-right ranks of right-wing insanity -- apparently undaunted by repeated failure -- are still desperately trying to prove that he's a secret Muslim.

This time, it's G. Gordon Liddy and Pamela Geller, pushing a dubiously-sourced claim that President Obama admitted to Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit that he is a Muslim.

Liddy opened up his radio show on June 14 by reading directly from Geller's blog post on the topic, calling it “breaking news” and stating that it comes under the heading “suspicions confirmed.”

Geller -- a prime distorter of anything and everything related to Islam -- wrote on her blog:

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said he had a one-on-one meeting with Obama, in which President Obama told him that he was still a Muslim, the son of a Muslim father, the stepson of Muslim stepfather, that his half brothers in Kenya are Muslims, and that he was sympathetic towards the Muslim agenda. [bolding in original]

To top it off, Geller went ahead and threw the words “I am a Muslim” in quotation marks and attributed the statement to Obama in the title of her post.

If that sounds pretty unlikely, maybe it's because Geller's sources amount to a chain of hearsay with no solid evidence to back themselves up. The closest we get to proof is a blogger -- who “would rather believe” that Obama was “born in Kenya, not the U.S.” until he sees “a real live birth certificate” -- telling us his wife happened to catch the Egyptian Foreign Minister on Nile TV saying that Obama said he was a Muslim.

Geller also links to an article in Israel Today that purports to directly quote Gheit's Nile TV appearance, claiming that he said, “The American President told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.”

Needless to say, no one has managed to dig up video of this appearance yet.

So not only is the statement “I am a Muslim” not a direct quotation, but Geller can't even confirm that the Egyptian Foreign Minister said what people said he said about Obama.

Instead of playing a game of telephone to try to get at the truth about Obama's faith, right-wing media might just go to the source and see what the only person really eligible to comment on the president's personal beliefs has to say.