The New Yorker published a letter from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee on why the magazine’s controversial cover, which depicted Sen. Barack Obama as a Muslim, was so offensive.
“Why is the label “Muslim” such a powerful and popular weapon against Obama?,” Kareem Shora, the group’s executive director asked in the letter.
“And what should the Obama camp be doing, instead of denouncing a magazine cover? What needs to be challenged at full volume is the association between a man in Muslim clothing and terrorism, and the underlying assumptions that being Muslim is the same as being un-American, that being Muslim is the same as being violent, that being Muslim is the same as being Osama bin Laden,” writes Shora.
You can read the full letter here.
FI2W wrote extensively – when the cover first came out – on the larger question raised by Shora on why being a Muslim should be seen as a ‘smear’ .
Check out “Liberal Snobs and the Rest of Us: Arab Americans Respond to the New Yorker Cover.”