Holding Muslims at Arm’s Length
By Derrick Z. Jackson
28/06/08 "Boston Globe"
I wish Barack Obama were a Muslim. Better that than having supercilious
staffers whisk women in
Islamic head scarves out of photo-ops. Better that than telling
Representative Keith Ellison of
Minnesota, the nation’s first Muslim congressman, not to come help Obama
in Iowa and North
Carolina.
Better that than wooing red states by wobbling before the modern
equivalent of the Red Scare.
In his year-and-a-half-long run for president, Obama has visited churches
and synagogues, but
no mosque. This has the musty feel of light-skinned African-Americans
passing for white,
paranoid over daylight visits from dark-skinned relatives.
Obama’s campaign has been far more inclusive than John McCain’s. Yet as of
late, Obama’s
handlers are so bent on passing their biracial, binationally-raised man as
a pure-blooded
American - a new commercial plays up his “values straight from the Kansas
heartland” - that
they are reinforcing the perception that Muslim Americans are impure.
Asked what he would say to Obama if he had the chance, Bilal Kaleem,
executive director of the
Boston chapter of the Muslim American Society, said, “It’s a tough
question, and it’s sad that
it’s a tough question. . . . I would suggest that he might have to do the
same thing [on Islam]
that he did on race. He addressed it head-on in a landmark speech. He gave
his speech in a
mature way. If he could speak in the same way to that, it could be
inspiring for our country
and the world.”
It is understandable why Barack Hussein Obama and his handlers suffer from
PTSD -
post-traumatic smear disorder. Political woodpeckers hammer falsehoods
from the right. Fellow
Democrat Hillary Clinton, when asked whether Obama is a Muslim, tackily
peeped, “there is
nothing to base that on, as far as I know.” Despite nearly hitting the
third rail over his
former Christian pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, only 58 percent of
Americans think Obama is
a Christian, according to a Newsweek poll in May.
It has been so outrageous that Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, an
independent and a Jewish
American, said the “whisper campaign” was “wedge politics at its worst.”
Kaleem said of Obama,
“We feel sympathy for him because it’s not just him who should be called
out; it is also the
people in the media and politics who made a cottage industry out of him
being a wolf in sheep’s
clothing and that all Muslims are subversive.”
But the sympathy may be short-lived as Obama’s “Fight the Smears” part of
his website has some
Muslims feeling betrayed by an over-the-top effort to denounce every
Obama-is-a-Muslim claim as
a “lie” and saying, “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised
a Muslim, and is a
committed Christian.” How about something like, “Senator Obama is a
Christian who, having lived
in the world’s largest Muslim country [Indonesia], having traveled in
Pakistan and having many
Muslim friends, appreciates American pluralism like no other candidate in
US history”?
A more positive approach by Obama of affirming Muslims while affirming his
Christianity
actually fits the nation’s values. A new Pew Research survey finds
Americans more open than
ever to a range of religious viewpoints. Muslim Americans themselves,
according to a 2007 Pew
survey, are “largely assimilated, happy with their lives,” and “decidedly
American in their
outlook, values, and attitudes.”
This obviously all came together for Ellison’s election, as the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune has
noted that his district has more Lutherans than Muslims. Ellison this week
told The New York
Times about Obama, “A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there’s
nothing wrong with
being a Muslim, by the way.”
A lot of Muslims are waiting because, seven years after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, an
undercurrent of suspicion remains. In the 2007 Pew survey, a third of
Muslim Americans said
that within the last year, they had either been treated with suspicion,
called offensive names,
profiled by police, or even attacked. Kaleem, a graduate of MIT, said he
sometimes is asked
during grant proposals how radical his group is.
“In a way,” Kaleem said, “it is good that these missteps have come out in
public so we can
start talking about the undercurrent, which is the real issue.”
Obama himself has said “Christians and people of other faiths lived very
comfortably” with each
other when he lived in Indonesia. It is time for him to live comfortably
with Muslims in his
campaign.
In a 2006 trip to Chad, Obama issued the Muslim greeting for peace. A wise
Obama would say
“assalamu alaikum” at home, too.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/06/28/holding_muslims_at_arms_length/
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