In an MLK speech today in Minneapolis, Colin Powell emphasized Obama's Muslim roots, when he imagined a living Martin Luther King Jr. being at the Capitol tomorrow "as Barack Hussein Obama took the oath of office." It was reminiscent of Powell's breakthrough comment on Meet the Press last October, when he celebrated a Muslim who had died serving in our armed forces.
If you're reading the tea leaves, and that's all I do, there were plenty of suggestions in Powell's speech about the importance of extending an enlarged American idea of freedom to the Muslim world, and Israel/Palestine. Powell said that King had been persuasive because segregation trapped not just blacks but whites, and King was able to demonstrate this. "Is this what we want to be? … Is this the image we want to give to the rest of the world?" White people said No. Yes and look at Israel's image now, which implicates the U.S. across the Muslim world.
He said that King would be pushing Obama to go further. It wasn't enough to celebrate justice for blacks. "We cannot truly be free till all are free." And by all, I heard those in the Middle East in whose oppression the U.S. is directly implicated, the Palestinians. Seemed to echo Brent Scowcroft's statement, that having removed our core historical injustice, the racial stain, it was now our role to extend that relief of injustice to the Palestinians.
