Fearful that some Republican 527 group, or Michelle Malkin, might grab an image of Barack Obama with two Muslim women wearing headscarves in the background, Barack's campaign volunteers barred a pair of his supporters from sitting behind the podium at a rally in Detroit, where Al Gore officially endorsed him.

This is mean, because it's, uh, kinda racist, and Obama is supposed to be the candidate that transcends the buzz phrase known as "identity politics."

This is also a very calculated move, because Obama has a Muslim "problem," in the sense that many of the voters he's trying to reach actually think he's Muslim, which isn't inherently bad, but isn't, sadly, the best thing to be for a presidential candidate. (Obama, meanwhile, has gone to great lengths to shoot down rumors that he's Muslim. And you know where that got him.)

And lest you think there was some other reason for why the two women were not seated within Obama's camera range – beside the campaign issuing an official denial – there's the pair of first-person tales.

This is Scenario 1:

In Detroit on Monday, the two different Obama volunteers — in separate incidents — made it clear that headscarves wouldn’t be in the picture. The volunteers gave different explanations for excluding the hijabs, one bluntly political and the other less clear.

In Aref’s case, there was no ambiguity.

That incident began when the volunteer asked Aref’s friend Ali Koussan and two others, Aref’s brother Sharif and another young lawyer, Brandon Edward Miller, whether they would like to sit behind the stage. The three young men said they would but mentioned they were with friends.

The men said the volunteer, a 20-something African-American woman in a green shirt, asked if their friends looked and were dressed like the young men, who were all light-skinned and wearing suits.

Miller said yes but mentioned that one of their friends was wearing a headscarf with her suit.

The volunteer “explained to me that because of the political climate and what’s going on in the world and what’s going on with Muslim Americans, it’s not good for [Aref] to be seen on TV or associated with Obama,” said Koussan, a law student at Wayne State University.

Both Koussan and Miller said they specifically recalled the volunteer citing the “political climate” in telling them they couldn’t sit behind Obama.

“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Are you serious?’” Koussan recalled.

And this is Scenario 2:

Shimaa Abdelfadeel’s story was different. She’d waited in line outside the Joe Louis Arena for three hours in the sun and was walking through the giant hall when a volunteer approached two of her non-Muslim friends, a few steps ahead of her, and asked if they’d like to sit in “special seating” behind the stage, said one friend, Brittany Marino, who, like Abdelfadeel, is a recent University of Michigan graduate who works for the university.

When they said they were with Abdelfadeel, the volunteer told them their friend would have to take off the headscarf or stay out of the special section, Marino said. They declined the seats.

After recovering from the shock of the incident, Abdelfadeel went to look for the volunteer and confronted her minutes later, she said in an e-mail interview with Politico.

“We’re not letting anyone with anything on their heads like baseball [caps] or scarves sit behind the stage,” she paraphrased the volunteer as saying, an account Marino confirmed. “It has nothing to do with your religion!”

In most work and school settings, religious dress — such as Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans and Muslim hijabs — is permitted where secular clothing, such as baseball caps, is not.

“The scarf is not just something she can take off — it’s part of her identity,” said Marino.

Photographs of the event also show men with hats in the section behind Obama and former Vice President Al Gore, though not directly behind the candidate.

[Politico]