So what if Obama is Muslim? The US should not demonise Islam

By: Barrack Muluka
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[ Posted On: 2008-08-29 ]

The dominant global voice is adept at creating a distorted reality. It is a deliberately deceptive American ideological voice, awash with counterfeit images.

Two such falsehoods, touching on race and religion, are playing themselves out around the person of Barack Obama, the US Democratic Party presidential hopeful. They give us an opportunity to interrogate some of the myths we have always accepted as truth.

You glean from the media everywhere that should he win the presidential poll in November, Mr Obama will be the first black President of the United States. His so-called ‘blackness’ keeps coming up in a variety of guises. It has eclipsed other considerations, although it is not politically correct to talk too eloquently about this.

Some want him to be elected because ‘he is black’. Others hate him for the same reason. Is Mr Obama a black man? What if he is or isn’t?

Taban Lo Liyong, a very black man, has asserted Negroes are not Africans. He says in The Last Word: "What we have are ‘coloureds’ in the South African sense of the word — meaning descendants of black African parents and white parents. Hence the Negro is a joint product of Africa and Europe, in America. If he calls Africa "motherland", he must also call Europe "motherland."

He has a right to be proud of the ancient African empires of Ghana and Songhai.

Equally, he must take pride in French civilisation, in the English Empire, in classical Italy and classical Greece.

"There was an act of deception. Whites called Negroes black; Negroes agreed they were blacks, no matter the amount of black and white pigmentation in their skin. Whites said Negroes came from Africa. Negroes agreed they came from Africa," he wrote.

When Marcus Garvey launched a ‘return to Africa’ campaign, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan supported him. Ku Klux Klan has been associated with some of the most atrocious racist acts in the world.

When the civil rights leader Malcolm X was only a little boy, the Klan burnt his father alive as he watched in fear.

You probably do not hear much of the Ku Klux Klan kind of overt racism in the US presidential campaign. But the slurs are there.

Even the Clintons have privately expressed reservations about Mr Obama "because he is black."

Some white youth recently got in trouble for making threats against him, on the same basis. But in point of scientific fact, Mr Obama is not any blacker than he is white. But what does it really matter if he were really black?

Appalling and diabolical alliance

Fixation on a candidate’s genetic make-up can only obscure who the man is and what he stands for. Neither Obama nor his Republican opponent, John McCain, is coming out, on account of focus on trivia and allied diversionary non-issues and pseudo-issues.

Questions of race aside, the US presidential race is also bringing a distorted searchlight to bear on Islam. There is deliberate, even orchestrated, effort to distort and demonise Islam and present Obama as a sympathiser of the demon.

Jerome Corsi’s book, Obama Nation, ties up Obama, Kenya’s Premier Raila Odinga and Islam in some appalling and diabolical triple alliance.

Some wild characters have indeed committed atrocities, ostensibly in the name of Islam. But should the land of the free deliberately lie to the world that the Al Qaeda and sundry killer machines are a metaphor for Islam?

Should they peddle Islam as the devil’s religion? So what if Obama’s father was a Muslim? What if he were himself a Muslim, indeed? What does it matter?

Other distortions in Corsi’s book are said to touch on polygamy, communism and the like.

I fail to understand how you can be a communist and Muslim at the same time. For, was it not Karl Marx who said all religion was rubbish — opium for the masses?

That aside, Islamic leaders have been unequivocal in their condemnation of terrorists, pretending to act in the name of Islam.

From Damascus to Riyadh and from Mecca to Medina, the Islamic world has been loud and clear on exploitation of their religion by demagogues and sundry savages.

As a Christian gentleman, I still recognise that we see God from different platforms.

We are like the proverbial blind men who touched different parts of the elephant and went on to believe the animal was variously the trunk, the tusks and the tail, depending on what one touched.

Islam is a true religion of God. The American war against terrorism is likely to gain meaningful mileage if the West quits mixing it up with terrorism.

Demonising Islam smacks of a wider ploy against religion. Already, Christianity is under assault in the United States. If other religions beguile themselves with the belief they are sitting pretty, they are deceiving themselves.

There is a Kiswahili saying about getting your head ready when you see them shaving your neighbour.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Barrack Muluka is a publishing editor and a media consultant with Mvule Africa Publishers. okwaromuluka@yahoo.com

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