Gen. Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president yesterday and slammed McCain's smear campaign of Obama as some kind of secret Muslim terrorist sympathizer (see video). Powell talked about a Muslim-American soldier killed in the Iraq war. Kareem Khan was only 20 when he was killed by a bomb in Baquba-Iraq last year with only a month left in his tour.
The photo of Khan's mother that so moved Powell:
"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star - showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old.
And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross; it didn't have the Star of David; it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life." - Colin Powell, standing up to the disgusting rhetoric and tactics of the McCain-Palin campaign.
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