Rep. Keith Ellison on the Ugly Attacks Obama Has Faced in the Election

On Nov. 7, 2006, Rep. Keith Ellison became the first Muslim to be elected to the U.S. Congress. Running on an anti-war platform and with a strong progressive voice on civil rights, unions and health care, Ellison won the seat vacated by Democrat Martin Sabo, who announced his retirement after 28 years. Representative of Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, which covers Minneapolis, Ellison is also the state's first African-American congressman.

As an actual American Muslim, Ellison is no stranger to the kind of prejudice and fearmongering that has been leveled at Barack Obama since he began his run for the White House, particularly his being maligned for being a Muslim (as if that in itself were proof of moral turpitude), and including claims that he is in cahoots with terrorists. But neither has it defined his political career. "You know what's funny," he says, "I was in the state house for four years. I converted to Islam when I was 19, and I'm 45 now. I was elected to the state house at the age of 39 -- and nobody cared. It was not a big deal. It was pretty well known (that I was a Muslim), but it just wasn't an issue."

"And," he adds, "I got elected post-9/11."

Things changed when Ellison decided to seek national office. "When I ran for Congress, that's when it sort of exploded," he says. "That's when it was a big deal; it was a huge issue -- and I was somewhat surprised." During the primaries, he had been criticized for things like unpaid parking tickets. But once he won the Democratic nomination, the attacks got uglier. Among the propaganda was a leaflet produced by his Republican opponent, who, as Ellison recalls, "sent out 110,000 pieces of literature saying that I cavorted with terrorist sympathizers."

"One of my opponents accused me of anti-Semitism for no other reason other than because I'm a Muslim," he says.

That opponent was Republican Alan Fine, who, on the day after Ellison became the Democratic nominee, decried what he described as his opponents' past associations with the Nation of Islam -- a claim chiefly based on Ellison's role in organizing a local coalition to attend the Million Man march in Washington, D.C., in 1995. "I am personally offended as a Jew that we have a candidate like this running for U.S. Congress," Fine said in a press conference on Sept. 13.

"But you know, despite all those efforts," says Ellison, I got the endorsement of the (Minnesota paper) American Jewish World, and I got a lot of support throughout the entire community. So it didn't work."

Ellison believes that Americans are more tolerant of religious diversity than this or the more recent fearmongering against Obama would suggest. "A lot of this religious intolerance stuff ultimately proves not to be successful. The people who want to perpetuate fear don't really comprehend how freedom to practice religious faith is ingrained in American culture." He sites the story of the pilgrims fleeing religious persecution -- a cornerstone of American identity -- as one example.

"You look at Thomas Jefferson's writings -- he wrote a lot about freedom of religion," he says. Indeed, at his inauguration, when Ellison chose to be sworn in on the Quran rather than the Bible -- launching a tidal wave of controversy among right-wing pundits -- he did so holding a copy of the book of Islam that once belonged to the author of the Declaration of Independence, on loan from the rare books collection of the Library of Congress.

Nonetheless, the same right-wing media outlets that have used bigotry and lies to smear Obama treated Ellison like a potential one-man terror cell following his election in 2006. In an interview with Glenn Beck on Nov. 14, the CNN anchor told him, "I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.'" ("I'm not accusing you of being an enemy," he went on, "but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.") Like Obama, Ellison was forced to reassert his patriotism, again.