barack hussein obama
first of all, there was an interesting (and long time coming) article in the new york times today:
Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama
there also happened to show up on my google reader today (or probably several days ago, i haven't been keeping up with it since turns out i have a real life now) an article from the guardian about whether rumors about celebrities being gay still matter (i didn't read all of it but it's here: 'We're still not a very tolerant society'.
these are both such delicate issues but i don't really understand why it's so hard for people (especially like the obama campaign) to figure out how to deal with them. you just say "no, he's not muslim, but he respects islam just like he respects any other religion (or culture or race or ethnicity or nationality or whatever)." it's not difficult. i'm not sure if it's true, but i'm going go ahead and take keith ellison's word that muslims are "still waiting for him to say that there's nothing wrong with being a muslim, by the way."
i'm a little bit disturbed, actually, by the fact that some aide didn't allow the two muslim women wearing hijab to stand behind obama at a campaign rally in detroit. especially in detroit, where the muslim population is so large, i feel like you can't have truly representative diversity without including some muslims in the picture. it's not okay that all it takes is for obama to call the women and apologize to them - apologies like that are nothing but political tools. i know he can't oversee the selection of the people standing behind him at rallies, but i think that while he and his campaign do have to make a conscious effort to right the rumors about his being a muslim (because while there isn't anything wrong with being muslim, the fact is that he isn't one), they also need to make a conscious effort to show that they appreciate the support of muslims for their campaign.
my favorite part is that closing line about endorsing the candidate that muslims least want to win. maybe i shouldn't mention too often that i found that obama 08 sticker in the perfume shop here in cairo? although when i asked about it the guy didn't seem to have any idea what or who obama was.
okay, that's my two cents for the day, since i am now sitting the computer lab at auc and have a bit of a chance to use the internet before going home to do the massive amount of homework i have tonight.
but in other news, last night we had our new cleaning lady come to the apartment for the first time. she is amazing, her name is zeinab, and she's the sweetest lady ever. she is taking care of her young son plus the five children of a friend who died recently in a car accident. and i chatted with her for awhile, which was really fun and probably very good practice. she made sure to talk kind of slowly so i could actually understand her.
katie and i also had one other small linguistic victory yesterday. we have this bawwab (doorman) kind of guy near our building who we can never understand because he always talks really fast and has a bit of a speech impediment. yesterday as we were walking home we stopped at a little shop to buy diet cokes (obvi) and as i was paying this random guy started talking to katie so we just told him we had to go and left, but he followed us almost all the way to our apartment (it was only about a block away). finally he tried to talk to us again and he was like oh maybe we can be friends now (now that i've just met you randomly once and kind of stalked you all the way home!), but we were like no, we have an appointment, goodbye, and walked away. but later as we were leaving we saw the bawwab and he was like "oh that guy who was talking to you before, you don't know him right? because he was standing around here waiting for you for awhile, but i told him to go away and leave you alone." now, it's rather an important victory that we had someone there who kind of was watching out for us, but i'm most excited about the fact that we actually understood everything he said!
i'm a little bit sick today, but not too bad. i don't think i've eaten anything off color or even out of the ordinary, last night for dinner we had koshari at this place really close to our house that i've eaten at several times and never gotten sick. so today for lunch i took it easy and just had some rice pudding. delicious.
okay, that's all for now, time to attack the homework. this week we are reading a bunch of articles about the hijab in egypt. it's a lot of reading, but at least i actually care what it says.
Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama
there also happened to show up on my google reader today (or probably several days ago, i haven't been keeping up with it since turns out i have a real life now) an article from the guardian about whether rumors about celebrities being gay still matter (i didn't read all of it but it's here: 'We're still not a very tolerant society'.
these are both such delicate issues but i don't really understand why it's so hard for people (especially like the obama campaign) to figure out how to deal with them. you just say "no, he's not muslim, but he respects islam just like he respects any other religion (or culture or race or ethnicity or nationality or whatever)." it's not difficult. i'm not sure if it's true, but i'm going go ahead and take keith ellison's word that muslims are "still waiting for him to say that there's nothing wrong with being a muslim, by the way."
i'm a little bit disturbed, actually, by the fact that some aide didn't allow the two muslim women wearing hijab to stand behind obama at a campaign rally in detroit. especially in detroit, where the muslim population is so large, i feel like you can't have truly representative diversity without including some muslims in the picture. it's not okay that all it takes is for obama to call the women and apologize to them - apologies like that are nothing but political tools. i know he can't oversee the selection of the people standing behind him at rallies, but i think that while he and his campaign do have to make a conscious effort to right the rumors about his being a muslim (because while there isn't anything wrong with being muslim, the fact is that he isn't one), they also need to make a conscious effort to show that they appreciate the support of muslims for their campaign.
my favorite part is that closing line about endorsing the candidate that muslims least want to win. maybe i shouldn't mention too often that i found that obama 08 sticker in the perfume shop here in cairo? although when i asked about it the guy didn't seem to have any idea what or who obama was.
okay, that's my two cents for the day, since i am now sitting the computer lab at auc and have a bit of a chance to use the internet before going home to do the massive amount of homework i have tonight.
but in other news, last night we had our new cleaning lady come to the apartment for the first time. she is amazing, her name is zeinab, and she's the sweetest lady ever. she is taking care of her young son plus the five children of a friend who died recently in a car accident. and i chatted with her for awhile, which was really fun and probably very good practice. she made sure to talk kind of slowly so i could actually understand her.
katie and i also had one other small linguistic victory yesterday. we have this bawwab (doorman) kind of guy near our building who we can never understand because he always talks really fast and has a bit of a speech impediment. yesterday as we were walking home we stopped at a little shop to buy diet cokes (obvi) and as i was paying this random guy started talking to katie so we just told him we had to go and left, but he followed us almost all the way to our apartment (it was only about a block away). finally he tried to talk to us again and he was like oh maybe we can be friends now (now that i've just met you randomly once and kind of stalked you all the way home!), but we were like no, we have an appointment, goodbye, and walked away. but later as we were leaving we saw the bawwab and he was like "oh that guy who was talking to you before, you don't know him right? because he was standing around here waiting for you for awhile, but i told him to go away and leave you alone." now, it's rather an important victory that we had someone there who kind of was watching out for us, but i'm most excited about the fact that we actually understood everything he said!
i'm a little bit sick today, but not too bad. i don't think i've eaten anything off color or even out of the ordinary, last night for dinner we had koshari at this place really close to our house that i've eaten at several times and never gotten sick. so today for lunch i took it easy and just had some rice pudding. delicious.
okay, that's all for now, time to attack the homework. this week we are reading a bunch of articles about the hijab in egypt. it's a lot of reading, but at least i actually care what it says.
posted by Dana at 12:54 PM
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