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How to besmirch the name of a presidential candidate
Next Saturday, Barack Obama, with merely two years notched in Washington as a United States Senator, will officially announce whether he is running for president in 2008.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 February 3, 2007
- Image Credit: Photo Illustration by Dwynn Ronald V. Trazo/Gulf News
Next Saturday, Barack Obama, with merely two years notched in Washington as a United States Senator, will officially announce whether he is running for president in 2008.
His first shot at national prominence came with a speech he delivered at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in which he reflected eloquently on traditional American values, such as self-reliance, hard work and perseverance.
Obama's father, as a young man, herded goats in his native Kenya before he arrived in the United States to study law, and his mother, a middle class, middle brow, middle American, hailed from Kansas.
His academic credentials are impressive: undergraduate work at Columbia University in New York, and Harvard Law School, where he became president of the influential Harvard Law Review.
And that does not include his three years in Chicago as a civil rights lawyer, defending the disenfranchised in poor, working class neighbourhoods in the city.
And here's a dividend: Obama was an early and prescient critic of the war in Iraq, warning the administration months before the 2003 invasion of the dangers of the "day after", dangers that would, as it were, lurk behind every lamppost in that ancient land.
Over the next two years, the field will clearly be crowded with presidential hopefuls contending for a shot at the White House, and Obama, who is often greeted with delirious crowds ("He sells more tickets than the Rolling Stones", quipped the governor of New Hampshire), and whom Time magazine put on its cover in October 2006 with the telling title, "Why Barack Obama Could Be The Next President", appears as a formidable contender to replace George W. Bush as the next, and the first African-American, president of the United States.
So where's the problem here? Why are several political groups, mostly from the conservative and religious right, mounting a sleaze campaign against this man, levelling aspersions on his multicultural background, his name and his ethnicity?
In short, these bigots are "accusing" him - and hold on to your hat - of being a Muslim and of having attended, while as a child living in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, a Muslim school, often referring to it as a madrassa, a term connoting for most Americans an institution that trains students in radical, "jihadist" literature.
Moreover, they have taken to constantly inserting Obama's middle name, Hussain, in their publications, talk shows and public discourse. Hussain, of course, evokes images of the man who went down with a noose around his neck, get it?
Hussain is the Other. Hussain is the bogey man. Hussain is a Muslim and who, horror of horrors, would want a Muslim in the White House? Hussain, however, happens to be in this case the middle name of Obama's father, that the senator does not use.
Racial prejudice
The magazine Insight, the organ of these folks' political commentary, responding to accusations by the mainstream media of resorting to slime and racial prejudice, asked in its pages recently, though not too subtly: "The media uproar over our reporting reveals a media establishment choosing not to ask the tough questions about Obama's Muslim past.
"If he was raised in a secular household (as he claims), why does he have, or retain, Muslim names, Barack and Hussain? Were his father and stepfather as secular as he says? What is the exact nature of Obama's current religious affiliation?"
And never mind the slurs directed at him by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, the nationally syndicated talk show host, and Tony Perkins, of the reactionary Family Research Council, who have taken exception to his faith.
This is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It is rather about the brazen fad of Muslim-baiting in the US, coming at a time when our two cultures, our two worlds, our two paradigms are covertly antagonistic, a time when a not an insignificant number of Americans continue to pay heed to the stubborn myth that Muslims, all Muslims, regardless of their backgrounds, or country of origin, are the "enemy".
It is not only vulgar to dismiss Muslims in that manner, but profoundly dangerous as well.
Writing recently in The Annals, journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Richard Bulliet, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, put it succinctly: "If this kind of rhetoric could be confined to describing a small segment of politically active Muslims, maybe we could live with it.
"But you can't contain rhetoric like that very easily when our national psyche is in the process of shifting from identifying this person or that group as extremists to beginning to identify Islam as a whole with the subset of violent activists so luridly described in the rhetoric of the press. The tainting of an entire religion and of all its adherents seems perilously close at hand."
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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