Earlier this year (Feb. 3, 2008), the Post-Dispatch ran a syndicated column by Leonard Pitts entitled “Obama’s not a Muslim, but would that be such a terrible thing?” Pitts started off on a positive note, seeking to dilute an innuendo already beginning to pervade partisan political rhetoric. His intent was laudable, but just as he was to get his case off the ground, Pitts veered off the runway. The problem, he argued, is not “being Muslim,” but being a Muslim “fanatic.” “I think the only difference between religious fanatics here and in the Middle East is that Middle Eastern nations tend to be theocratic…” With that sweeping, and wildly inaccurate, generalization, Mr. Pitts cut the ground from beneath his otherwise most welcome attempt to address the latest metamorphosis of anti-Muslim bigotry.

More recently, retired army general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell confronted the same symptoms of bigotry in his endorsement of Barack Obama. Responding to innuendo, and outright assertions, that Obama is a Muslim and, therefore, surely a terrorist sympathizer, Powell argued two points. First, the “correct answer” is that Obama is not and has never been a Muslim, but, secondly, the “really right answer” is “What if he is?” Like Pitts, Powell countered the suggestion that there is no contradiction between being both American and Muslim. Powell exemplified his point with the moving story of a young Muslim soldier who died on Army duty in Iraq. No stranger to the insidious and corrosive effects of bigotry, Secretary Powell described the double-edged pathos of a Muslim mother grieving over her son’s Arlington Cemetery gravestone. Powell’s wonderfully bold and poignant statement is, like Pitts’ earlier commentary, a welcome move in the right direction. Sadly, however, it will leave too many Americans thinking that dying in a war against other Muslims is the only way a young man born in the USA can claim to be unambiguously both Muslim and American.

John Renard
St. Louis