Below The Beltway

I heard the news about Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama before I saw his interview on Meet the Press yesterday, but there was one moment of the interview that struck me:

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America,”

Powell also spoke, quite eloquently actually, about one particular image that moved him:

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine.  It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave.  And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone.  And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death.  He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith.  And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey.  He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.  Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way.  And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know.  But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.

You can see the photo that Powell talks about for yourself here.

General Powell raises the same point that CNN’s Campbell Brown did in a recent commentary — why should it matter if Barack Obama was a Muslim or not ? There is, at it’s core, something very un-American about the entire “Barack Obama is a secret Muslim” meme that has been spread throughout this entire campaign by both pro-Hillary Democrats and by Republicans, and it’s the idea that someone’s religion should disqualify them from even being considered for public office.

We fought a war and founded a nation in part to get away from that idea, and the fact that there are people out there pushing it for political advantage should be offensive to every American.