April 3, 2008 - Issue
271 |
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The
Senator, His Pastor and the By Ali Abunimah B |
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[This commentary was originally published in The Electronic Intifada] US Senator, Barack Obama, was widely hailed for his 18 March speech calming the media furor about the sermons of his pastor for twenty years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s remarks, Obama said,
It might seem odd
for Obama to mention But for months,
even before most Americans had heard of Wright, prominent pro-Israel
activists were hounding Obama over Wright’s views on Since his early
political life in But Obama stressed that his appeal to Jewish voters also stems from his desire “to rebuild what I consider to be a historic relationship between the African American community and the Jewish community.” Obama has not addressed
to a national audience why that relationship might have frayed. He was
much more candid when speaking to Jewish leaders in Obama implicitly
admitted that Wright’s views were rooted in opposition to And the relationship
was durable. As The Washington Post reported in 1987, “When it
comes to In 1987, Jesse Jackson,
then the world’s most prominent African American politician, angered
some Jewish American leaders for insisting that “Whoever is doing business
with South Africa is wrong, but Israel is ... subsidized by America,
which includes black Americans’ tax money, and then it subsidizes South
Africa” (“Jackson Draws New Criticism From Jewish Leaders Over Interview,”
Associated Press, 16 October 1987). As a presidential candidate,
Thus, Reverend Wright,
who has sought a broader understanding of the Middle East than one that
blames Islam and Arabs for all the region’s problems or endorses unconditional
support for That is not to say
that Jewish concerns about anti-Semitic sentiments among some African
Americans should simply be dismissed. Racism in any community should
be confronted. But as they have done with other communities, hard-line
pro-Israel activists like Foxman have too often tried to tar any African
American critic of By contrast, neither Senator Joe Lieberman (Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 and the first Jewish candidate on a major party presidential ticket), nor Senator John McCain have been required so publicly and so repeatedly to repudiate extremist and racist comments by Israeli leaders or some well-known radical Christian leaders supporting the Republican party. Foxman, whose organization devotes enormous resources to burnishing Israel’s image, has rarely spoken out about the escalating anti-Arab racism and incitement to violence by prominent Israeli politicians and rabbis. That is no surprise. African Americans, Arab Americans and Muslims all share some things in common: individuals are held collectively responsible for the words and actions of others in their community whether they had anything to do with them or not. And the price of admission to the political mainstream is to abandon any foreign policy goals that diverge from those of the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian lobby. BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Ali Abunimah, is a Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). Click here to contat Mr. Abunimah and the The Electronic Intifada.
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