Over the weekend we saw John McCain correcting a woman who said she didn’t trust Obama because he’s Arab. Some may have wondered where that came from. We’d heard all about horrendous emails claiming Obama is a secret Muslim (not true) but how did that morph into him being an Arab?
To some degree the conflation may result from the fact that many Americans simply believe being Arab and being Muslim are the same thing, even though most Muslims in the world are not Arab (and not all Arabs are Muslim). The fact that Obama’s middle name is Hussein undoubtedly helped make the claim stick, as did the campaign’s recent claim that Obama “pals around with terrorists” (since many Americans equate Arabs with terrorism).
But there’s a simpler explanation for the sudden rise of the Obama-is-an-Arab idea: Rush Limbaugh. On his September 22 radio show, Limbaugh said:

“He’s not black. Do you know he has not one shred of African-American blood? He doesn’t have any African — that’s why when they asked whether he was authentic, whether he’s down for the struggle. He’s Arab. You know, he’s from Africa. He’s from Arab parts of Africa.”

For the record, Obama’s mother is a white from Kansas. His father is from Kenya, a part of central Africa that is not Arab.