At a Philadelphia synagogue today, Barack Obama claimed always to have felt a “kinship” with the Jewish community. Add this declaration to the fact that he’s half-black, and that his exposure to Islam as a child and acceptance of Christianity as an adult could cause theologically conservative Muslims to consider him an apostate, and the sum is indisputable. From an identity standpoint, the United States could not send a more provocative leader into negotiations with the Arab Muslim world.

This fact hasn’t interfered with the year-long media fetishization of Obama’s skin tone and cultural affiliations. In an Atlantic feature last fall, Andrew Sullivan speculated on a hypothetical future in which Obama is president. Sullivan found that, because of Obama’s appearance, “America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.” Sullivan gushed on:

If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Anti-black racism is rampant in large swathes of the Arab and Muslim world. Apostasy ranks among the highest crimes in the moral outlook of extremist Muslims. The unfettered rise of a black apostate to the country’s highest office would hardly cure a racist jihadist of his resentment toward American openness and prodigality. And once you throw some Jewish “kinship” into the pot, you can bet such feelings will be, in Sullivan’s words, “ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.”

It would be interesting to hear from John Kerry, who recently said that Obama’s blackness would help bridge the U.S-Muslim gap. Where does Kerry suppose Jewish kinship ranks on Obama’s list of ethnic-based negotiation credentials? And what about Camille Paglia, who wrote last week that

with an ill-conceived, wasteful war dragging on in Iraq and with the nation’s world reputation in tatters, I believe that, because of his international heritage and upbringing, Obama is the right person at the right time.

Does she feel that his life-long kinship with Jews will somehow help the U.S. in Iraq?

These considerations don’t affect much on the world stage. But they are apparently of the utmost importance to many Obama supporters. For them, race, religion, and gender trump questions of policy. It’s amazing that such single-minded people have managed to get their one issue so perfectly wrong.