In the emotional response after 9/11, a Sikh was shot dead in Arizona--the turban that he wore, like many Sikhs who do for religious reasons, made the assailant think the Sikh was one of Osama's followers. That ignorance about Sikhism as a religion cost an innocent Sikh man his life.
That was almost ten years ago.
Now, it is not an uninformed person but the president of the United States who is apparently falling into that same ignorant trap.
The NY Times reports that Obama's people don't want the president to visit the Golden Temple because a few ignoramuses might then conclude that Obama visited an Islamic shrine because he is really a Muslim:
Mr. Obama was expected to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, next month, but there were questions about how he would cover his head. Sikh tradition requires that men tie a piece of cloth on their heads before entering the spiritual center. The president, who is Christian, has fought the perception that he is Muslim. Sikhs are regularly mistaken for Muslims.
“There’s a xenophobic trend in this country, where some people are calling him Muslim,” said Jasjit Singh, associate director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a Washington-based civil rights group. “If he gives in to this trend then effectively he’s emboldening them.”
It will be unfortunate if such stupid politics make a chicken out of the allegedly most powerful man on the planet.
Now, as even the same news item indicates, there are plenty of security reasons for the President to avoid going there.
Amritsar, which is the city where the Golden Temple is located, is not too far away from the Pakistan border. Lahore, in Pakistan, is just about twenty miles from Amritsar. It is all that close.
But, how come this administration seems so hell bent on messing things up, as if the South Asian situation is not crisis enough? :(
