Colin Powell told Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press" last Sunday how he was moved when he opened the New Yorker a few weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother resting her head on the Arlington gravestone of her son who had been killed in Iraq. He was stopped cold when he read the headstone: Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. Above his name was the star and crescent, denoting his Islamic faith.
Powell said he stared at it for a long time. This young man was buried at Arlington. No one questioned his faith or his patriotism. He was an American who died for his country. Something in the picture seemed out of sync with the whispering we have been hearing in the current presidential campaign.
Powell pointed out he has been troubled by what some Republicans, not McCain, have been saying,
"'Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.' Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be President?"The answer is no, nothing at all wrong with any American of any faith aspiring to be President.
And still the e-mails persist. I get them and I suspect you do as well. I won't repeat their utterly disgusting assertions here. The time for such transparent racism is over. We have a fine American in Barack Obama -- endowed with a large measure of intellectual curiosity, personal integrity, and an inordinate amount of instinctive good judgment -- among other qualities that make him uniquely qualified to lead us at this time.
