More on the Soldier Kareem R. Khan

James Forman echos these thoughts:

If you missed it, please please watch what Colin Powell said.   His words are so much more powerful than the simple fact of the endorsement.  Ta-Nehisi's blog has the links to the Powell interview here (it is 7 mins long, and the short follow up press conference is worth watching too if you have 5 xtra minutes).  Powell's words are measured, but all the more persuasive for it.  The highlight for me is Powell making the case that that even if Obama were muslim, so what?  A muslim child in America cannot grow up dreaming he can be president?  The muslims who have died fighting for this nation are not Americans?  I know, I'm still pissed at Powell about Iraq too.  But he really lays it down in this endorsement.  And if you think Powell's principled stand doesn't matter, more than one Arab friend of mine has written in the last 24 hours to say that they literally wept while watching Powell on Meet the Press.

Also, check out the amazing photo of the mother that Powell mentions. 

Here's an article about the soldier in this picture:

He and three other soldiers, including a corporal from Washington Heights, were killed in Baquba after a bomb detonated while they were checking abandoned houses for explosives. They served in the Stryker Brigade combat team of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, based in Ft. Lewis, Washington.

Mr. Khan graduated from Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin in 2005, and enlisted in the Army a few months later, spurred by his memories of the 9/11 terror attacks. “His Muslim faith did not make him not want to go. It never stopped him,” his father, Feroze Khan, told the Gannett News Service in a story printed shortly after his death. “He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do.”

Mr. Powell mentioned Mr. Khan’s death to underscore why he was deeply troubled by Republican personal attacks on Mr. Obama, especially false intimations that he was Muslim.

Mr. Obama is a lifelong Christian, not a Muslim, he said. But, he added, “The really right answer is, what if he is?”

“Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? No, that’s not America,” he said. `

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More on the Soldier Kareem R. Khan

By The New York Times

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/more-on-the-soldier-kareem-r-khan/index.html

On “Meet the Press” today, Colin L. Powell concluded his endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama by referring to the death of a Muslim soldier, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan of Manahawkin, N.J., who was killed in Iraq on Aug. 6, 2007, and whose remains were buried in Arlington.