Obama’s Muslim roots are a plus, not a minus

My parents often read the Russian language newspapers printed in the US for the predominantly Jewish Russian speaking community. A while ago, my father showed me an article about Barack Obama’s Muslim roots. With alarm, my Dad said that Obama was dangerous for the US because both his father and stepfather were Muslim and he had attended a Muslim school in Indonesia. (I think these papers may neglect to mention that the candidate’s parents met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii.)

I think his exposure to the Muslim world is even more reason to vote for him.

To my parents’ generation, any Muslim heritage is a red flag of fear. But, I, realizing that being multicultural makes me a bridge between cultures see the candidate’s ethnicities and religious backgrounds as pluses. A former high school classmate of mine, whose parents are from Taiwan, told me that he loved Obama’s books because they told a common story felt by many bi-cultural and immigrant people.

Who better to negotiate with Muslim extremists targeting our country than someone who actually knows something about their faith and culture?

Though I am no expert an all things Islamic, I did live in a majority Muslim city – Sarajevo. I was there in 2000-2001, organizing economic development projects in minority villages that were destroyed during the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian war. My family and my Russian community sometimes scolded me for “supporting the Muslims”. They thought I should have supported the Christian Orthodox Serbs because they were allied with Russia.

What?

In Russia, I can’t call myself Russian because I am Jewish, so why should I bear allegiance to a country that deemed me a second-class citizen upon my birth? Why should I continue the tradition of religious discrimination to which we were victims?

It’s not just the Russian Jewish community in the US that sees Obama’s ancestry as problematic, other Americans do as well, as we see on Fox News. I wish we could see beyond the similarities of the names Obama and Osama and see that the Senator’s major advantage over any other candidate is that he has lived abroad and knows intimately what it is like to be in another culture or religion.