The headline-getting dubious recent Pew Research Poll that reported 20 percent of Americans believe the President is Muslim had CNN reporting the fact that our president is not Muslim as a “New Development” a year and a half into the man’s presidency. Some Americans may believe Obama is Muslim. Some Americans may simply want to believe that he is Muslim. Others may just not like him and will say that they think he’s a Muslim because they see that as some kind of slur.
Yet an actual real-life high-profile Colorado Muslim, Seeme Hasan, the major Republican donor and friend to Republican leaders for years, said she thinks Obama is anti-Muslim, which is one of the few reasons she’s not defecting from what she sees as the knee-jerk opportunistic bigotry of the new Palin-Gingrich GOP.
This is what Seeme Hasan told TPM Thursday:
Hasan says at this point, Republican politicians [like Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck] have little choice but to join the GOP in opposing Cordoba House, and she understands that.
“I would tell him to go ahead and be against it. I did not support it when the top people started this. I did not support that,” Hasan said. “Newt and Sarah Palin and all the others made it so the rest of the Republicans have no choice.”
[…]
Though she called into question whether or not she’ll remain in the Republican party, Hasan said that in any case it will be difficult, if not impossible, for her to be as supportive of the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2012 as she was of George W. Bush in 2000. She says she has only one reason to suspect she’ll put a great deal of effort into defeating Barack Obama: His policies are perhaps more anti-Muslim, Hasan says, as Bush’s were. “It’s like my son says, he’s been more hawkish than Dick Cheney.”
Seeme’s son Ali–screenwriter, comedian and former candidate for Colorado Treasurer– has been similarly frustrated by the “Ground Zero mosque” debate. He recently blogged at the Huffington Post that government leaders in New York are practicing a form of illegal racist “redlining” in preparing to offer developers of the Park 51 Cordoba House or “Ground Zero Mosque” project a free parcel of land in Manhattan far away from the World Trade Center area.
In the 1960s and 70s, he writes, the government built new housing projects where rent was cheap and effectively pushed nonwhites into certain parts of the city by encouraging them to live in the projects and surrounding neighborhoods:
Documented cases show mortgage and loan companies often steering African-Americans and minorities into housing projects, concentrating them far from “white” neighborhoods. Once placed in such projects, minority populations were aggressively redlined, with banks denying mortgage and business loans that would help minorities leave, sometimes only on the basis of geography.
[…]
So allow us to review – [Congressman] Peter King and [Governor] David Paterson are suddenly offering a group of minorities (Muslims) a free piece of land – a ‘sweetheart’ deal of compassion – in exchange for their permanently leaving a major business section of Manhattan and never coming back?
America, we have seen this before.
Many predicted this was the year Republicans were going to take back seats in swing-state Colorado, but any gains may be short term, at least from a demographic perspective. The leading conservative Hasans have nearly had enough, and the political leadership on the right– including gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo and the members of the Republican Study Committee this week gaining press for traveling to Arizona together to celebrate that state’s new controversial immigration law — are surely giving even conservative Latinos reason to vote Democrat.
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