The Daily Novel

Barack Obama got it just right tonight talking to Larry King on CNN. He told him that the New Yorker cartoon did not bother him. He had developed a thick skin in fighting this Presidential campaign. But he said it was an insult to Muslim Americans.

Quite right too.

The cartoon, see below, depicts his wife as a gun-toting Black Power terrorist of an earlier age, when her only offence has been to admit that she had difficulty in being proud to be American. In voicing these honest sentiments she reflects the reality of America’s black, coloured and Latino community. They are mostly the poor struggling to survive in George Bush’s America, even more difficult than it was in Jack Kennedy’s America.

Barack Obama himself is portrayed in what is presumably meant to be Muslim dress. In fact, he looks more like Pandit Nehru, the Hindu leader of the India that emerged from the British Raj. Much more like him than Jinnah, who emorged as the leader of the first Muslim state, created in 1948 when the British folded up their Indian Empire. Jinnah, like the present leader of Pakistan, was more devoted to the western way of life, than he was to the Pakistan poor.

Which is why Bangladesh, which was part of the original Pakistan, is now an independent state, and one of the poorest in the world.

Nehru, by contrast, was a respected international statesman, who strove to establish an independent India, which was not the slave of the west, so he maintained relations with the then Soviet Union, during the Cold War, when Stalin was regarded as far more dangerous to the American dream, than Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden combined.

People younger than me may not have got this message.

But people younger and older than me will I hope see the thrust of Obama’s response. The insult is to America’s Muslims, not to Barack Obama. After all, we know he is a Christian, not a Muslim. And we also know that he has spent most of his life as a law lecturer at Harvard.

Not downloading stuff from the internet about how to make plastic explosives.

The fears of America’s Latinos and many Clinton supporters is that America’s first black President may in power become an Uncle Tom, cowtowing to the white rulers.

The hope for Western liberals like myself is that if achieves office he will behave more like Pandit Nehru. And help to heal the internal splits in America and the even larger schisms in the world at large.

Meanwhile, even George W Bush has had enough of sabre rattling. According to a Guardian exclusive he is considering sending American diplomats back to Iran, instead of starting yet another war.

But the real insult is to those many Americans, who, unlike Obama, are devout Muslims, but who do not espouse the doctrines of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.