Rep. Keith Ellison on the Ugly Attacks Obama Has Faced in the Election [View All]

[struggle4progress]

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted November 2, 2008.

... "You know what's funny," he says, "I was in the state house for four years. I converted to Islam when I was 19, and I'm 45 now. I was elected to the state house at the age of 39 -- and nobody cared. It was not a big deal. It was pretty well known <that I was a Muslim>, but it just wasn't an issue" ...

Things changed when Ellison decided to seek national office. "When I ran for Congress, that's when it sort of exploded," he says. "That's when it was a big deal; it was a huge issue and I was somewhat surprised." During the primaries, he had been criticized for things like unpaid parking tickets. But once he won the Democratic nomination, the attacks got uglier. Among the propaganda was a leaflet produced by his Republican opponent, who as Ellison recalls, "sent out 110,000 pieces of literature saying that I cavorted with terrorist sympathizers" ...

"You look at Thomas Jefferson's writings, he wrote a lot about freedom of religion," he says. Indeed, at his inauguration, when Ellison chose to be sworn in on the Quran rather than the Bible (launching a tidal wave of controversy among right-wing pundits), he did so holding a copy of the book of Islam that once belonged to the author of the Declaration of Independence, on loan from the rare books collection of the Library of Congress ...

Ellison has been critical of the Obama campaign's response to the anti-Muslim smears against him. "A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim," Ellison told the New York Times in June. Ellison, whose own congressional campaign shared themes of unity and hope with Obama's, says that when it comes to Muslim voters, his campaign represents a "missed opportunity" ...

http://www.alternet.org/rights/105740/rep._keith_ellison_on_the_ugly_attacks_obama_has_faced_in_the_election/