對歐巴馬參觀清真寺的評價。
It only took him seven years. But maybe it was worth
the wait.
On
Wednesday afternoon, the president of the United States mounted a podium inside
a Maryland mosque to give a much-trailed
speech challenging the
rising tide of anti-Muslim bigotry in his country. (Although, as the author and
lawyer Qasim Rashidjoked on Twitter, "I heard @POTUS wants
to make his landmark address at a mosque a truly authentic American Muslim
experience, so he's arriving an hour late.")
Born to
a Muslim father from Kenya, raised from the age of six to 10 by a Muslim
stepfather in Indonesia, Barack Hussein Obama has been dogged by crazy,
conspiratorial claims that he is a "secret Muslim" ever since he first declared his candidacy for
president.
Banal Islamophobia
A recent poll found
that 29 percent of Americans and 43 percent of Republicans still believe Obama
is a Muslim and, as Salon noted: "The number of Republicans who think
Obama is a Muslim has actually increased since 2010." For the record, the
president is a Christian who had both of his daughters baptised.
It
cannot be stated often enough that the astonishing prejudice, not to mention
sheer ignorance, displayed by Republican voters in states such as Iowa - where
only 49 percent of
them believe Islam should be legal - is the product of a well-funded and coordinated campaign to
demonise Islam and Muslims in the US.
This
has ranged from nonsensical protests against "creeping sharia" to a manufactured controversy over the
so-called "Ground Zero" mosque; from claims that
Hillary Clinton's chief aide is part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot to infiltrate
the US government, to smears against
a Muslim ninth-grader in Texas who was wrongfully arrested for bringing a
home-made clock (a bomb!) to school.
In
party-political terms, Islamophobia is now a vote-winner in
right-wing Republican circles. How else to explain the number of
Republican Party presidential candidates falling over one another to find new
and obscene ways to bash Muslims? The campaign has seen Donald Trump call for a ban on Muslims entering
the US, Ben Carson refusing to countenance a
Muslim president and "moderate" Jeb Bush demanding that the US
government focus its support on
Christian, rather than Muslim, refugees from Syria.
Push-back
On
Wednesday, the commander-in-chief pushed back. Obama loudly denounced "distorted
media portrayals" of Islam and the people "conflating the horrific
acts of terrorism with the beliefs of an entire faith". He
condemned the "inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim Americans
that has no place in our country" and drew a causal link between hate
speech and violence.
"No surprise, then, that threats and harassment
of Muslim Americans have surged," he told his audience in Maryland.
"Here at this mosque, twice last year, threats were made against your
children. Around the country, women wearing the hijab … have been
targeted. We've seen children bullied. We've seen mosques vandalised." The
first non-white president of the US also had no qualms about identifying the
racial component of Islamophobia: "Sikh Americans and others who are
perceived to be Muslims have been targeted, as well."
Dismissing
talk of a "clash of civilisations between the West and Islam", Obama
refused to ask Muslim Americans to choose between their identities.
"You're not Muslim or American," declaimed the president.
"You're Muslim and American."
To
which the only sane response from any Muslim, and anyone who claims to care
about racial equality or religious liberty, surely has to be: Hallelujah!
Yes,
Obama has been silent on the issue of growing Islamophobia for far too long
(though, to his credit, he did slam Trump's
anti-Muslim vitriol in his State of
the Union speech in January).
Yes, he
should have visited a US mosque much earlier in his presidency: it is
scandalous that Obama's trip to the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday
was his first appearance at a mosque
on US soil since entering the White House (a
mosque which, as it happens, is less than 50 miles from his Pennsylvania Avenue
home).
Bigotry
prevails
A
belated denunciation of anti-Muslim bigotry from the president of the US, in
front of a Muslim audience in a mosque, is a denunciation nevertheless. A
much-needed denunciation from the most important public figure in the land.
Would some of his Muslim critics, I wonder, prefer it if he had not given the
speech?
In
fact, given the rise of Trump and the fallout from the massacre in San
Bernardino, California, Obama's timing, ironically and unwittingly, couldn't have
been better. "Coming to a mosque is a public reminder
that Muslims have been part of America since our nation's founding,"
Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates told CNN in
the run-up to the event.
A public reminder in an era in which, as the president
himself openly acknowledged and the statistics clearly
demonstrate, there has been a
surge in the number of attacks on Muslims and mosques in the US.
A
public reminder, to quote Obama, that "an attack on one faith is an attack
on all our faiths," especially in the midst of a Republican primary
campaign in which proudly Christian candidates rush to smear and stigmatise
Muslims. (Marco Rubio, incidentally, claimed Obama's
mosque visit was another example of him "pitting people against each
other"; Trump sneered that
the president "feels comfortable there".)
Mere
rhetoric?
As I have argued elsewhere, Obama's
own official statements and policies on counterterrorism and civil
liberties issues have been far from perfect. From NSA spying on
Muslim Americans to drone strikes in
Pakistan,
from anti-Muslim
profiling at US airports to support for Israel's bombardment of
Gaza,
the president has undoubtedly upset, frustrated and angered millions of Muslims
at home and abroad.
Some
might justifiably argue that his administration's militarism and surveillance
helped to incite the fear of, and hatred towards, Muslim Americans that he so
eloquently rebuked in his speech on Wednesday.
Cynics,
therefore, may dismiss Obama's mosque speech as mere rhetoric. But rhetoric
matters. Those who argue that the president's
speech won't, or can't, have an impact are either naive or disingenuous.
As Christopher Smith, of Claremont University, has demonstrated, one of
the best ways to combat anti-Muslim bigotry is a "bipartisan effort by
government and media to avert discrimination by framing Islam in a positive
way".
It may
indeed be depressing and disturbing that, in 2016, the US president feels
compelled to make a speech reminding Muslim Americans that "you're right
where you belong. You're part of America, too". But, to be honest, I'm
glad he did. And I also worry whether the next president will even bother.
At the very beginning of his address at the Islamic
Society of Baltimore, Obama told his audience that he wanted to say "two
words that Muslim Americans don't hear often enough - and that is, thank you."
"Thank
you for serving your community," he continued. "Thank you for lifting
up the lives of your neighbours, and for helping keep us strong and united as
one American family."
So,
putting aside some of my own criticisms of
Obama's domestic and foreign policies for a moment, let me say this, on behalf
of my Muslim-American daughters and my headscarf-wearing Muslim-American wife,
who has been verbally abused on the streets of this nation's capital:
thank you, Mr President. Thank you for standing up to anti-Muslim
bigotry and racial demagoguery; thank you for challenging the "New McCarthyism" that is Islamophobia.
Better
late than never.
Mehdi Hasan is an award-winning journalist, author, political
commentator and the presenter of Head to Head and UpFront.
The
views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily
reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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