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The ’swift boating’ of Barack Obama has begun

Fakhr uddin Ahmed
THE "swift boating" of Senator Barack Obama has started in earnest. Through his association with former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Republicans and their surrogates have started a smear campaign to label Obama as an unpatriotic and racist anti-Semite.
Former president Bill Clinton suggested that only Hillary and John McCain "love their country," insinuating that Obama may not. If President Clinton had cared to read Obama's best seller, The Audacity of Hope, the last sentence in the
book would have struck him: "My heart is filled with love for this country."
Rightwing guttersnipes have reduced Obama's lofty speech on race, "A more perfect union" — a rhapsody -- into distorted sound bites. Realising that Obama's grandiloquent speech would go over the heads of the average Americans, they decided to do some translation.
Sean Hannity of Fox News, the unofficial TV channel of the Republican Party, had a unique take on Obama's comment: "I can no more disown him (Rev. Wright) than I can my white grandmother -
- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
"Obama called his grandma a racist!" cried the bigot-in-chief.
Promising to rerun the Rev. Wright videos through the election, the destructive genius of deductive reasoning offered his own analysis: "Since Obama sat in the pews and
listened to Rev. Wright's anti-American, racist, and anti-Semitic rants for twenty years, that makes Obama unpatriotic, racist, and anti-Semitic!"
Hannity, the Aristotle of Fox News, would not dream of accusing Senator John McCain of "guilt by association" because of his association with "spiritual advisors" antiCatholic pastor Rev. John Hagee and anti-Muslim pastor Rev. Rod Parsley. The furor over Rev. Wright's comments gave the Fuhrer, Rush Limbaugh, the perfect excuse to dismiss Obama as a "race candidate."
Right-wingers are worried that if the average Americans actually read Obama's speech, they may be tempted to participate in an honest discussion on race and be inspired to vote for him. Therefore, they are telling Americans what to think of thespeech.
Removing contexts from Obama's speech, they have caricatured it to racially-tainted anti white snippets the Average Joe can recoil at.
They are mad because in his speech Obama exposed the modus operandi of the hate merchants: "Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism."
No party ever won the presidential race after eight years in power, when the country is in recession. Republicans lose on every major issue, such as the economy and die Iraq war. Prices of essentials have shot up; gasoline is over $3 a gallon.
Americans are hurting. Just as they won the 2002 and 2004 elections by touting national security, this time around the Republicans believe they can steal another one by impugning Barack Obama's patriotism and labeling him an anti-white anti-Semite.
Surely, an anti-Semitic Obama would not have said this in his speech: "(Rev. Wright] expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country -- a view that sees the
conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."
Three of the four Obama foreign policy advisors are Jews, including Bill Clinton's Middle East peace envoy Dennis Ross.
Just as he was trying to implicate Obama in Rev. Wright's sins, a photograph surfaced showing Bill Clinton greeting Rev. Wright in the White House during his presidency. If Rev. Wright was such an extremist, how did he merit an invitation to the White House? Clinton tried to explain it away by saying all kinds of people visit the White House. Oh, yeah? Since it is so easy, maybe I should try and visit the White House to meet the president!
Will the rightwing Republicans succeed in denying Obama the presidency by demonising him? For America's sake, let's hope they will not. Since Americans know little about Obama, his detractors have tried to fill the void with mis-
information, such as he is a Muslim. At least that rumour has been shot down.
Many Americans will not vote for a totally black candidate. Rarely does a charismatic, brilliant and inspiring candidate come along who is half white and half black, and dreams of unifying the races.
Progressive Americans realise that President Obama will be a tremendous healing force at home What Americans may not realise is that President Obama will do wonders for America’s image abroad.
Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed is a Rhodes Scholar and Daily Star columnist