Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group commented (criticized, no need for euphemism on my own blog) on Obama’s latest speech to the Muslim world at the Cairo University on June 4.
Granted that most of Ms. Parker’s columns leave me fuming, I have learned to agree to disagree with her and her fans. There is no arguing in politics and religions. That’s why when people get together, they watch sports. (Or so I assume. We don’t watch sports in our house, and therefore we are not popular on our block… Oh, that and the fact I have an Obama sticker on my car…)
I can see her point in “Obama’s Muslim campaign“: that Obama in his speech to the Muslims quoted too many lines from the Qur’an and criticized the errors in the U.S. history just a tad too much to make audience back at home squirm uncomfortably. But here is the sentence that really got my attention, not in a positive way:
“To delegitimize the man whose name rhymes with his, Obama had only to show up and not be George W. Bush.”
1. Yes, I tend to obsess over one tree and ignore the forest. I get to do this in my personal life. So there.
2. I am not about to defend W.
What I have an issue with is this insinuation of a relation between Obama and Osama, “the man whose name rhymes with his.”
Come on! Give me a break!
We are guilty by association of family names now? Great! Remember during World War II when all the Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to the concentration camps? (Oh, I am sorry, RELOCATION CAMPS they were called), many non-Japanese Asians in the U.S. hastily proclaimed their non-Japanese-sounding surnames for fear of guilt by association of family names. So we are going back to that now?
Here is my advice for all the non-mainstream citizens in this multicultural only in theory society, name your kid Brandon and Emily, and if you can, change your name to something less foreign sounding. For the sake of your children, in case they run for important public office one day.
Although the definition of “Foreign” is arguably faulty here. Basically anything that does not invoke a Western heritage…
