Bill O’Reilly has released previously unseen photos of United States President, Barack Obama in Islamic dress claiming they were taken at his half-brother’s wedding.
The Fox host said it was ‘very difficult’ to verify the exact location of the photographs, but claimed they were taken in Maryland in the early 1990s.
The photos have not been independently verified, but O’Reilly used them in a monologue alleging the President’s ‘deep emotional ties’ to Islam have stopped him effectively combating terrorists.
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He said: ‘There is no question the Obama administration’s greatest failure is allowing the Islamic terror group ISIS to run wild, murdering thousands of innocent people all over the world, including many Muslims.
‘Mr. Obama has never, never acknowledged that mistake, nor does he define the ISIS threat accurately.
‘That group is killing innocent people in order to impose a radical version of Islam on the world. The jihad is solely based on theology, perverted as it may be.’
Obama’s refusal to use the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’, preferring instead to say ‘militants’ or simply ‘terrorists’ has long been a sore spot for his Republican detractors, including Donald Trump.
However, the President has hit back at these criticisms, saying that the row over the phrase is a ‘political distraction’ from the real threat in the Middle East.
He added: ‘If there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who… we’ve taken off the battlefield.
‘If the implication is that those of us up here and the thousands of people around the country and around the world who are working to defeat ISIL aren’t taking the fight seriously, that’d come as a surprise to those who’ve spent these last 7 1/2 years dismantling al-Qaida in the FATA, for example.
‘[That would surprise] the men and women in uniform who put their lives at risk, and the special forces that I ordered to get [Osama] bin Laden and are now on the ground in Iraq and in Syria. They know full well who the enemy is.’
Obama spent the early part of his life growing up in Hawaii as the son of an American woman and Kenya father who practiced Islam before he left the family when the future-President was two.
Shortly afterward, Obama’s mother, Ann, remarried to an Indonesian man who took Obama to his home country, a predominantly Muslim nation, where he lived for four years.
According to the Miller Center, Obama later said of the experience: ‘I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child.
‘And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me.’
During that time Obama attended both Muslim and Catholic schools, before returning to live in Hawaii with his grandparents, who were not religious and gave him a secular upbringing, Dailymauil UK reported.