WASHINGTON: Americans have been celebrating July 4 as their independence day since 1776 when they won freedom from Britain. For most of the world, this date has meant little more than watching a colourful display of fireworks on their television screens.

But this year is different. This year America is only four months away from electing its first non-white president; an event the entire world awaits with bated breath.

The man who created this opportunity for the Americans to put behind centuries of racial prejudices and elect a black man spent the independence day weekend in the Republican heartland, hoping to win over those who have always voted for the rival camp.On July 4, Senator Barack Obama was in Montana, doing all a good American is expected to do: flipping burgers, eating hot dogs and watching a parade.

Montana has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate just twice in 50 years. Recent opinion polls, however, show that Senator Obama already has an edge over his Republican rival John McCain in this conservative state as well 48 to 43 per cent.

Yet this election is not about statistics alone. It has deeper meanings and nobody knows that better than Mr Obama.

“I know that there is no other country out there where I could be standing before you as somebody who could potentially be president of the United States,” he told his would-be voters. “We are going to change the world.”He definitely has a point when he talks about changing the world. If he is elected on Nov 4, it will change the US political history. But Mr Obama is promising much more.

In campaign appearances, Mr Obama regularly mentions his multicultural background, invoking his interactions with Muslims in Africa, Indonesia and Pakistan to show that he is uniquely qualified to end the confrontation between western and Islamic worlds.

“A lot of my knowledge about foreign affairs is not what I just studied in school. It’s actually having the knowledge of how ordinary people in these other countries live,” he said. “The day I’m inaugurated, I think this country looks at itself differently, but the world also looks at America differently.”

But before he goes about changing the world, Mr Obama has to win the election. And in the election campaign, the senator’s multicultural background cuts both ways. While his supporters see this as a qualification, his opponents argue that it disqualifies him from occupying the highest office in a country at war with the Muslims. As the election approaches, the attacks on Mr Obama get worse, targeting particularly his alleged Muslim past.

Even a random search of the web brings 4,270,000 entries for “Obama Muslim”. Readers learn that “Obama’s father was a Muslim polygamist from Kenya. His step-father was from Indonesia where he studied Islam, attended a madressah, went to the mosque for prayers, took religious classes and studied Arabic.”

One such website invites readers to “think carefully” why a young Obama visited troubled areas in Pakistan and India in 1981.

“Lot of young Muslim students trying to define their identity often visited Karachi and Hyderabad, India, cities that were a hot bed of religious strife and extremism.”

Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative American historian, warns that Mr Obama’s conversion to Christianity may annoy the Muslims, giving them yet another reason to hate America. “How would more mainstream Muslims respond to him; would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy? That reaction is a real possibility, one that could undermine his initiatives toward the Muslim world.”

An email quoted in a Washington Post article on this issue warns: “The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the US from the inside out. What better way to start than at the highest level, through the president of the United States, one of their own!”

Obviously, none of these writers paused to think that what they are saying could be offensive to four to six million Muslims living in the United States and to more than a billion across the world.

“The underlying point is that if you can somehow pin Islam on him, that would be a fatal blow,” says Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based Muslim advocacy group. “It’s offensive. It speaks to the rising level of anti-Muslim feeling in our society.”