Colin Powell’s declaration — ‘So what if Obama is a Muslim?’ After being treated as political kryptonite and depicted as enraged Orcs for the past seven years, Muslims and Arabs — the media’s modern day Morlocks — temporarily emerged as human beings thanks to Colin Powell’s Obama endorsement on Sunday. The former US secretary of state partially redeemed his tarnished legacy by asking:
“What if (Obama) is (a Muslim)? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be president?
“Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: He’s a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”
Unfortunately, according to an increasingly vocal, racist and Islamophobic minority, which has been shamefully aided over the years by the inexcusable silence of a complicit mainstream media, there is something fundamentally “un-American” about wearing the contemporary Scarlet Letter: Muslim.
The October surprise unleashed by a desperate Republican campaign — spearheaded by mavericks John McCain and Sarah Palin — reeks from the stench of a modern day, fearmongering McCarthyism — replacing communism with Islam.
Obama, that biracial, African American son of a Kenyan with an Arab name, is apparently now a “Socialist with Islamic background” according to anti-Muslim McCain supporters at a now infamous McCain Virginia rally. When asked to prove such an audacious claim, the rabble rouser replied: “Well, he was raised in a madrasa (in Indonesia) ...there’s a lot of background ... I can’t do that right now.”
Perhaps he received his cues from McCain and Gov. Palin. Although Colin Powell swears McCain is no racist, the media conveniently forgets his obscene and unapologetic 2000 statement: “I hate the Gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.”
Therefore, is it truly surprising that McCain’s running mate, Troopergate Palin, recently cast doubt on Obama’s “past” due to his associations with Reverend Wright, his “terrorist pal” William Ayers, and most recently in a speech where she compared Obama to a socialist.
According Sarah and her acolytes, Obama’s Arabic name and nonexistent Islamic roots emit threatening “un-American” and “terrorist-y” vibes.
In contrast, however, Powell’s surprisingly tolerant words, which he should have uttered in 2003 in lieu of his shameful UN Security Council “anthrax in a vial” speech, reflect a growing Republican self-awareness of previously unchecked “smear by Muslim association” rhetoric. In fact, at the same Virginia McCain rally, several Conservative Christian and Muslim McCain voters chastized the “Obama is a Muslim” inciter as racist and unrepresentative of their beliefs.
One wonders what took Powell, so long to make such elementary and rational statements regarding Muslim and Arab Americans. CNN’s Campbell Brown should be commended as being one of the first vocal members of the mainstream media to ask, “Even if Obama is a Muslim — so what?” Even actor Ben Affleck deserves applause for reminding the world on Real Time with Bill Maher that “Arab and ‘good person’ are not antithetical to one another.” The next evolutionary step, of course, will be “He’s Muslim — not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Followed, hopefully, by “Why, some of my best friends are Muslim!”
Eventually, it will culminate with a blindingly obvious realisation that indeed Muslims — like every other group — are patriotic American citizens, just like the 20-year-old specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan mentioned in Powell’s speech. Sultan, a Muslim American native of Manahawkin, New Jersey, and the recipient of the prestigious Purple Heart and Bronze Star, now rests in Arlington Cemetery after giving his life to protect and serve his country in Iraq.
