Even if you are not a Muslim, calling someone a Muslim in America is a common political technique to destroy a candidate’s chances for election.

Barack Obama is best known as an overnight political success story. Only a few years ago, he was just a local legislator in the Illinois State Senate.

Two years ago, we was slated for the US Senate and won. Today, he is seen as a potential candidate for president of the United States. And, he is African American. And, his middle name is Hussein, and his father was, in Obama’s own words, an African “goat herder.”

When he ran for the US Senate, questions about Obama’s religion did not surface and few challenged his claims that he is a Christian. Few new that his middle name is “Hussein.”

But now that he is running for president, unidentified critics are planting stories that Obama is a Muslim. And even if it isn’t true, the fact of the rumor can be enough to destroy his candidacy.

I experienced that first hand.

People in the Arab and Muslim World need to know something right off the bat. Most Americans can’t tell the difference between “Arabs” and “Muslims.” The only people who can see the differences are Arabs and Muslims themselves.

Calling someone an “Arab” and calling someone a “Muslim” is the same, especially in American politics.

After leaving journalism for a controversial political sabbatical in 1992, I ran for a legislative office in Illinois, where I lived. I was challenging a six-year incumbent who was Republican in the state legislature. The Democratic Party leaders endorsed me mainly because my name recognition as a well-known regional political reporter was high. They felt it might give me an edge over the incumbent.

It helped.

But I didn’t expect to win. It was my first run for public office, although I knew I had a chance. My main goal was to learn firsthand everything that I could possibly learn about political campaigns.

I had covered American politics for 18 years from outside the fishbowl and now I wanted to see what it was like in the water with the “sharks.”

Of course, everyone knew I was Palestinian. It was something I wrote about often whenever I could in my columns with much pride.

And although I had strong backing, good polls showed my opponent could be defeated, I had to work hard. I did everything the right way. I raised nearly $70,000, mostly from Arab Americans who also hoped to one day see an Arab American hold public office in Chicagoland, which had a growing Arab and Muslim population.

Although that population had settled in the city more than a century earlier, they had and have absolutely no clout. There are more than 250,000 Arabs and another 400,000 Muslims in the Chicago area, yet they have nothing. No parade like every other ethnic group in a city best known for its ethnic identity, nor a holiday. Not one building or edifice built to acknowledge the enormous contributions Arabs and Muslims have made to Chicago and its history.

We continued to face bigotry, before Sept. 11, and even more afterward.

But I was running in the pre-Sept. 11 era when the hatred of Arabs and Muslims was more generic and driven by racism rather than by fears of terrorism.

And things looked great, until one week before the election in late October 1992.

An anonymous person published a fancy full color brochure that was mailed, it appeared, to every registered voter in the district.

That’s no small feat. More than 44,000 people voted in that election, Republicans and Democrats.

Mailings are important in elections. They usually focus on issues that separate candidates. Campaigns often mail out as many as five mailings in the weeks before elections to voters.

But this mailing was sinister. My opponent denied any involvement in it, although the news media pretty much ignored the entire controversy and little was reported.

The brochure basically said that “Ray Hanania is not just an Arab, he is Iraqi.”

It was significant because the brochure came right after the United States had launched its first war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and was engaged in an uncertain military future.

I still managed to win more than 20,000 votes, but the letter did enough damage to undermine any chance, if I had one, to win the election.

That same factor is going to haunt Obama. The rumor has been published and is circulating the Internet that Obama is a Muslim who is pretending to be a Christian.

Last week, a news organization claimed that Obama attended a “Madrasa” or Islamic school in Indonesia. Never mind that the publication making the claim is the conservative “Insight Magazine” that few Americans read. And never mind that the alleged school is not religious at all, but a “public school.”

The fact is that the debate has grown furiously and the issue of Obama’s religion is now front and center in the jockeying for the presidential campaign which official got off the ground this past week.

Regardless of the truth, the claim will stick for many Americans.

No one will ask, “So what?” Many Americans are educated in religious schools themselves. Jews. Catholics. Protestants. And Muslims.

But the term “Madrasa,” the Arabic word for school, has a different negative meaning in America. It shares the same oppressive discrimination that words like “Arab” and “Muslim” also share today. And it has the same power to derail a campaign as did the claim 15 years ago that I was an Iraqi. My only real anger with the letter writer was that I am Palestinian and proud of that fact. Imagine. It wasn’t bad enough to be Palestinian.

How sweet and fleeting progress against racism has been in the “land of the free.”

­— Ray Hanania was named the “Best Ethnic Columnist in America 2006/2007” by the New America Media. He can be reached at www.hanania.com.