whenever the subject comes up, everyone has to say obama is not a muslim. it's true, he is not. he's christian.
but we all have to refute it forcefully because muslim = terrorist to many americans, thanks to george and the rest of his creeps, who have exploited the stupid masses. that's the message the fox news types always want to inject into their poor, poor, ignorant viewers because they can. there are people who simply aren't worldly enough, or educated enough to know any better.
and so, i thought it interesting that thomas friedman at the nyt dare mention that muslims in other parts of the world are excited about obama because obama represents worldliness (he's lived in indonesia, a largely muslim population), and if he was elected, it would mean that america is back to being america. wouldn't that be nice, as lofty as it seems.
wouldn't it be nice if this time, the stupid people, the extremists were hushed and the voice of america, the one that was built on embracing and accepting all stripes of people became the loudest.
nyt: I just had dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with two Egyptian officials and a businessman, and one of them quoted one of his children as asking: “Could something like this ever happen in Egypt?” And the answer from everyone at the table was, of course, “no.” It couldn’t happen anywhere in this region. Could a Copt become president of Egypt? Not a chance. Could a Shiite become the leader of Saudi Arabia? Not in a hundred years. A Bahai president of Iran? In your dreams. Here, the past always buries the future, not the other way around.
These Egyptian officials were particularly excited about Obama’s nomination because it might mean that being labeled a “pro-American” reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama’s demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in — as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam — will be much more attuned to global trends.
My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times’s bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo’s famed Blue Mosque: “Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: ‘Hillary-Obama tied?’ in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn’t have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage. ‘For me and my family and friends, we want Obama,’ he said. ‘We all like what he is saying.’ ”
