“It shouldn’t matter if you look different”

Back when I was a blogger - instead of whatever it is I am now - this is the kind of thing that would have set off my hypocrisy alarm:

Greg Sargent at TPM says that the ad by the California-based PowerPAC advocacy group is designed to attract some Hispanic-electorate love for Barack Obama (there’s a version en español as well). All well and good, though it seems to me that if anyone needs to take the “it shouldn’t matter if you look different” sermon to heart, it’s the people who run the Obama campaign itself. I guess PowerPAC was unaware of the campaign’s past snubbing of Muslims which has extended from insulting treatment of political rally attendees to discouraging the freely volunteered help of the country’s first Muslim congressman. Highly ironic!…if by “irony,” you mean glaringly hypocritical.

Obama does himself and the country a disservice by shunning the Muslim demographic over optics. Deep in the heartland of America, the Kansas City Star echoes the point:

Had Obama attended an interfaith banquet in Topeka earlier this year at Washburn University he would have heard Ingrid Mattson talk about Muslims in America. These are not people to be avoided.

They are as patriotic as anyone. Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, decried efforts of the misinformed to “divide us to create fear.”

“A lot of damage can be done by people with misinformation,” said Mattson, director of the Islamic chaplaincy and professor at the Macdonald Center for Islamic Studies & Christian-Muslim Relations at the Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn. “All that means is our work is harder. We need to work more to get our message out.”

They want others to welcome and accept them. They want everyone to see they are Americans, too.

A little less political calculation and a little more courage from Obama and his campaign would be welcome. Assuming, of course, that the campaign’s claims of inclusiveness aren’t just talk.

Note: As a fun exercise, count the number of headscarves in the PowerPAC ad.

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