Suddenly, I became a late-night cable B movie script writer. I started wondering who kidnapped the editors of The New York Times OpEd page, and replaced them with Muslim-hating lookalikes. (If you’re interested in that plot line, Cinemax, we should talk. But you should know up front, no nude scenes.).

Or maybe, I wondered, the conspiracy theorists were right. Maybe the gatekeepers of opinion in America do hate Muslims. I mean, think of how often Ayaan Hirsi Ali gets to spew her Islamophobic poison in those pages.

Thankfully, the OpEd in question – an absurd piece of trash claiming that Islamic law requires Muslims to view Obama as an apostate because his father was born a Muslim, leading to Obama being assassinated with the tacit support of Muslim states – generated a set of intelligent responses by people who actually know something about Islam, which The New York Times OpEd page printed (apparently, the aliens returned the original editors).

Ingrid Mattson, the President of the Islamic Society of North America, wrote, “Islam is not an ethnic affiliation, nor is it passed through the gene pool … Islam does not consider Barack Obama ever to have been part of the Muslim community. Apostasy has no relevance here.”

Zaid Shakir, a respected Muslim scholar and teacher at the Zaytuna Institute wrote, “People in Muslim countries are aware that Senator Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and yet he enjoys wide support in those countries. That support has nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s being a full, half or non-Muslim; it is rooted in the fact that he promises to change the kind of policies that have led to such a negative view of America by people in other countries, both Muslims and members of other faith communities.”

The whole incident got me thinking about American Muslims and Obama.

Of the many American Muslims I’ve talked to about Obama’s candidacy, not one has mentioned anything about Obama being a Muslim. They don’t think he’s a Muslim now, they don’t believe he ever was a Muslim, and they don’t hold out any hope that he will one day become a Muslim. It’s simply not an issue.

My guess is you will find very few American Muslims in the 13% of the population who believe Obama is a Muslim, or the 26% who say they’re not sure about his religion (statistics are from a recent Newsweek poll).

Given how desperate American Muslims are to have some type of positive representation in the public square, you would think that we would be the ones doing our best to advance the fiction of Obama being a Muslim.

I talked to my friend Mazen about this. An American Muslim, a corporate attorney in Chicago, and a huge Obama supporter, Mazen told me that he wept while listening to Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. He even got a little choked up repeating his favorite line: “the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes America has a place for him, too.”

(“I related so deeply to that,” Mazen told me. “Except for,” he added a bit ruefully, “the skinny part.” He was more like a chubby kid with a funny name.)

Listening to Mazen, something occurred to me. His support for Obama had nothing to do with the ‘Muslim’ side of his American Muslim identity, and everything to do with the ‘American’ side.

The way Obama reconciled his own multiple identities - black and white, Kenya and Kansas, community organizer and corporate lawyer – provided a model for Mazen’s life. And it provided a metaphor for America, perhaps the most diverse country in human history, a nation whose challenge is to make sure that its internal differences are mutually enriching instead of mutually exclusive.

Come to think of it, that’s the same reason so many of my American Jewish, American Catholic, American Buddhist, American Hindu and American secular friends support Obama too.

I wonder when The New York Times is going to print that OpEd.