Last week, Mazen Asbahi, stepped down as Barack Obama's Muslim outreach adviser. He held the position from July 26 until August 6, at which point he resigned from the volunteer position. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were questions about Mr. Absahi's "involvement in an Islamic investment fund and various Islamic groups." A CNN blog also repeated that Mr. Absahi's decision was based on his desire "to avoid distracting from Barack Obama's message of change," particularly as his involvement with those groups tied him for a brief period to Jamal Said, who has been linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. On June 26, this blog looked at the criticism Obama was getting from the Muslim-American community on account of the perceived disparity between attention given to Christian and Jewish Americans on the one hand and Muslims on the other. For this reason, the position of Volunteer National Coordinator for Muslim Affairs was a promising step in ensuring that the Arab and Muslim vote would not be divided between the two candidates. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Absahi was too well-connected to fill the post without political controversy. A recent Al Jazeera piece reminds readers that "three-quarters of the US Arab-American electorate is Christian, but they nonetheless share Arab-Muslim concerns on racial profiling, the war in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Obama cannot afford to ignore the politics of the Arab-American community or the Muslim-American community. At the same time, Obama is maintaining his ongoing attempts to dispel rumors about his own religious faith , arguing that the "whole strategy of suggesting" he is a Muslim actually shows widespread anti-Muslim sentiment. The WSJ article cited above also includes a fascinating Pew Research Poll that shows only 57% of Americans identified Obama as Christian, while 12% said he was Muslim, and 25% did not know. Those figures help explain why the front cover of the New Yorker last month may have been particularly offensive and politically controversial.
