Spot the bigotry
So-called liberal politician Bob Kerrey apologises for ‘insulting’ Obama because Kerrey brought up his Islamic ‘connections’. The only insult here is the one against Islam caused by Kerrey’s apology.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections08/barackobama/story/0,,2230941,00.html
Obama wins apology over Muslim remark
Ed Pilkington
Friday December 21, 2007
The Guardian
A backlash against attempts to smear the presidential hopeful Barack Obama by suggesting he has Islamic connections claimed another scalp yesterday when a former senator was forced to apologise for referring to Obama’s Muslim heritage.Bob Kerrey wrote to Obama to apologise for any insult he had unintentionally caused by bringing up the Muslim link in the process of endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. He told the Washington Post that “I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim.”
In his apology, Kerrey said he meant no disrespect but accepted his comments were insulting. The speed of his retraction underlines how formidable the Obama campaign has been at protecting the senator for Illinois from political attacks.
December 23rd, 2007 at 9:44 pm
I don’t understand that. I guess no religious person in America would really like me as I’m an open Atheist and I’m not afraid to say it.
Yeah, the U.S. do always makes a big deal of democracy. Personally I don’t think democracy is fair but what else can you do. Democracy is just majority rules, even if that majority is only 30% and the rest of the population have split between two or more other candidates. It’s ridiculous as 30% can win an election, when it’s quite obvious 70% of the population is against that candidate. That’s not representative at all.
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December 23rd, 2007 at 10:45 pm
I find it interesting that being a Muslim now means you must be under suspition. growing up in the Middle East I have lots of friends who are Muslims and while I don’t believe what they do I like them and find that many of them are nicer then many of the Americans I have met. I think Canada is a little more open to differences but there are still many people who are just generally (even though many of them think they are not) very biased toward different races of people and religions.
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December 23rd, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Another point in fact: “Terrorism” isn’t limited to religious groups, but there have been particularly harsh groups throughout history.
Zionist terrorists and warbands were renowned in Palestine for viciousness during and before WW2, for example. And now most of their members are part of the Israeli government, or at least served in it for the last 50 years. I’m not anti-Israeli, but here’s a case where people who blew up lots innocent people in a mostly non-war situation became leaders of a country.
Or the IRA, which is relatively famous too. I remember when the “war on terror” started out and someone raised the question of whether Bush was also against the IRA… And the answer I got just seemed to reflect that they hadn’t even thought about it, and had limited terrorism to be an entirely Muslim stereotype.
I think the biggest trouble with the whole mess is that now Islam has been given a new stereotype in the eyes of Americans. It’s virtually the same as it was for Jews for the past 2000 years. They were all associated with an act that was canonized in the Bible, and prosecuted for all that time because of it and those characteristics of being “greedy.” While Islam isn’t quite in the same position overall, Muslim communities in the US can suffer because of this prejudice because of their status as a minority there.
Minority treatment doesn’t have the best record in the US at all.
This can be even worse since, officially or not, Muslim communities are probably targeted by government as potential security liabilities. This gets underlined by the attacks in the UK which everyone fears were acts from UK-born citizens who happen to be Muslim. It doesn’t help the fear.
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December 23rd, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Ah, that’s interesting…
Fixes my point a little, but the point stands. Piety’s important in an American leader. Quite a few other countries would hate the idea of their leader being overly religious. As important as religion can be to people and families, it probably shouldn’t affect political decisions.
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March 25th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
The really scary thing about this is the fact that Obama’s group felt they had to run in and immediately deny that he is Muslim. I mean, so what if he is? What difference does that make?
& to add to that, the apology that implies that saying someone is Muslim = insulting them.
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