Real Unity or Mere Campaign Slogans: Obama and American Muslims
Presidential Candidate Barack Obama still has the support of a majority of American Muslims, but a New York Times article from June 24, 2008 questions whether there is a “disconnect between Mr. Obama’s message of unity and his campaign strategy.” One reason for questioning his sincerity is Obama’s failure to visit a single mosque during the campaign season. Muslim Americans interviewed for the NYT article said that the implication is that there is something wrong with being Muslim, particularly because on Obama’s website, “he classifies the claim that he is Muslim as a smear.” The article reflects on Representative Keith Ellison’s concern that Obama’s aides are not considering carefully enough that Muslim Americans are being alienated from the campaign process. The questions about Obama’s evasiveness picked up intensity after reports that two Muslim women were recently prevented from sitting behind Obama at a rally in Detroit. The reason for the exclusion of the women may have been, according to a report on politico.com, that Obama’s aides are almost paranoid about the need to deny rumors that Obama is Muslim, leading many members of the Muslim American community to “feel betrayed.” Questions are being raised in two directions: Whether Obama is really driven to create a unified America and whether Muslim Americans are a sufficient political force that Obama cannot afford to ignore them.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
[…] Last week, Mazen Asbahi, stepped down as Barack Obama’s Muslim outreach adviser. He held the position from July 26 until August 6, at which point he resigned from the volunteer position. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were questions about Mr. Absahi’s “involvement in an Islamic investment fund and various Islamic groups.” A CNN blog also repeated that Mr. Absahi’s decision was based on his desire “to avoid distracting from Barack Obama’s message of change,” particularly as his involvement with those groups tied him for a brief period to Jamal Said, who has been linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. On June 26, this blog looked at the criticism Obama was getting from the Muslim-American community on account of the perceived disparity between attention given to Christian and Jewish Americans on the one hand and Muslims on the other. For this reason, the position of Volunteer National Coordinator for Muslim Affairs was a promising step in ensuring that the Arab and Muslim vote would not be divided between the two candidates. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Absahi was too well-connected to fill the post without political controversy. A recent Al Jazeera piece reminds readers that “three-quarters of the US Arab-American electorate is Christian, but they nonetheless share Arab-Muslim concerns on racial profiling, the war in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Obama cannot afford to ignore the politics of the Arab-American community or the Muslim-American community. At the same time, Obama also maintains his ongoing attempts to dispel rumors about his own religious faith – arguing that the “whole strategy of suggesting” he is a Muslim actually shows widespread anti-Muslim sentiment. The WSJ article cited above also includes a fascinating Pew Research Poll that shows only 57% of Americans identified Obama as Christian, while 12% said he was Muslim, and 25% did not know. Those figures help explain why the front cover of the New Yorker last month may have been particularly offensive and politically controversial. […]