Today, in the (Quaker-founded) City of Brotherly Love, Sen. Barack Obama gave what is probably the most important speech of his entire presidential campaign. It was wise, thoughtful, honest, redemptive, hope-filled, and intensely focused on the central issue of his campaign: the need to bring the US citizenry together in the search for a more just social order.
The speech confirmed, for me, that Obama does indeed have the wisdom required to lead this nation in the complex years ahead.
The main challenge he was confronting in making the speech was the way that race issues have started infiltrating into the Democratic nomination race in a very insidious way. There were Geraldine’s Ferraro’s (actually quite bizarre) recent comments to the effect that Obama had gotten as far as he has gotten only because of his race; and there has been much muttering and dissemination of anti-Obama innuendo based on video clips of some sermons given by his long-time pastor in Chicago, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Wright retired some time ago from the pastroship at Obama’s church and is no longer his pastor.
Obama dealt in what I thought was a fair-minded, clear, yet generous-spirited way with the issues raised by and about both Ferraro and Wright. Regarding Wright, Obama went to some lengths to express his strong criticism of some of the specific things Wright has said (and therefore, done), while notably not disaffirming him totally as a person, a valued former mentor, and a friend.
To me, this is a very important move for anyone to make. People need to be able to criticize the actions (or words) of other people without disaffirming them as people. We certainly all need to the hold to the idea that people, all people, including ourselves, are capable of doing both good things and bad things; (and we should hope that we ourselves end up doing more good than bad.)
Obama spoke quite a lot about what Wright and his UCC church have meant to him over the years. He also, as I’ve said, criticized some of Wright’s specific utterances. Then, he paired this view of Wright, and Wright’s occasional (but, it turns out, well documented) explosions of anti-white anger, with his view of his own white grandmother. He says of Wright:
- I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love…
This is indeed a fascinating look into what makes Obama tick. In essence, because of the multiracial character of his upbringing and his family, Obama has an “insider’s view” into the way that many white Americans talk among themselves about race issues, and of the way that many black Americans talk among themselves. Within each community, these are generally viewed as “dirty little secrets.” But keeping them secret rather than airing and discussing these fears, concerns, and accusations more openly has allowed them to fester.
He promises us something different. More honesty, more national unity, and more focus on the many very urgent tasks of social (re-)building that our country faces at the twilight of the George W. Bush years.
This is an amazing and important speech. The only small flaw– a concession, no doubt, to the problems that many strongly pro-Likud people have been foisting onto him– was his specific disavowal of an argument that Rev. Wright apparently made, to the effect that the conflicts in the Middle East have been rooted primarily in the actions of Israel (described by Obama as a “stalwart ally”–“instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
Well, my view is that the actions of Israel and the hateful ideologies of some (but not all) of the proponents of radical Islam have both contributed to the conflicts in the Middle East. And so, in an even greater way, have the actions of the US government. So Obama’s flaw there doesn’t seem major to me.
His speech is primarily about inter-group relations here in the U.S. It is a great one.
Actually, the quote you mention about Israel made me decide that he does not infact have leadership qualities. He is unwilling to stand up to special interests and his cowardice is too great to speak truth to power. Obama has become too much of an empty vessel for me to support him. Not long ago i heard him talk about the farm lobby in much the same way he does Israel (though, he talks about Israel is much more certain terms). But he lost my support with that one comment on Israel. My willingness to give him a try was lost. Also, notice that he makes no mention of the plight of Muslims in his speech. Even though he is attacked every day for being one. It is amazing that he is to much the coward to defend Muslims in his major speech about racial injustice in America. I consider it a very weak speech and it is sad that the left is so willing to support someone so soft on substance and so willing to sell out.
Obama’s statements gave American voters the rare treat of a glimpse into the deeper humanity of this candidate. Many Americans have intense multi-cultural backgrounds or had experiences that enable them to appreciate the exceptional advantages of a personal perspective that embraces universal values instead of divisive tribal issues. Obama’s candidacy is a challenge to Americans to really lift what we like to call “our values”.
Like all candidates Obama is not going to offend the jewish vote.
He is, after all, a politician – although he’s very good at pretending not to be.
That is precisely why Israel is a proxy of the United States of America, Israel is a colonial state. The non Arab inhabitants of that state are victims whom lost their moral conscience.
Till they regain it, humanity will await.
The Jewish vote was not a factor in this election, neither for Hillary bb.
Can America be any luckier to have a candidate like Barak Obama ????
Congratulations Helena, they are good people in the States.
..into what makes Obama tick ”
I will go further and say: what makes Obama rock those who follow his speeches around the globe.
It’s not a question of the “Jewish vote.” It is something much more American: the insistence that lip service is paid to idiotic positions. The “Israel is only defending itself” mantra has become another loyalty oath.
American history is full of such intellectual logjams in which, in the face of evidence to the contrary, candidates for office (public or private, political or academic) are required either to swear that a particularly murky shade of black is white, have never been a member of the Communist Party, believe in laissez faire economics and honour the Chamber of Commerce.
What is needed (he would make a great V-P on Obama’s ticket) is the great Major – de Coverley from Catch 22, to come into the mess hall and put an end to the nonsense.
The pokers,
Phil, I don’t know whether you’re going to comment separately on Obama’s speech regarding Reverend Wright. But in any event, it contains a relevant passage — completely out of character with the rest of the address — which is pertinent to the “fealty to Israel” issue:
“[Rev. Wright] expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
http://www.drudgereport.com
Apparently Without Irony, Washington Post Says Jewish Advocates Demand that Obama Show ‘Fealty to Israel’
The story continues: supporters of Israel are rising against Obama, there is a major push this week to destroy his candidacy. Today’s Washington Post reports on a debate yesterday arranged by United Jewish Committees in D.C. among Jewish advocates for Hillary, Obama, and McCain. The debate became a rout, the Post columnist averred, in which the advocates for Hillary and McCain “used their time to raise doubts about Obama’s fealty to Israel.”
Fealty to Israel? They portrayed Obama as a dangerous leftwinger, and when the Illinois senator’s surrogate defended Obama’s statement that the U.S. does not have to cleave to Likud policies, Ann Lewis, Hillary’s advocate, responded:
“The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.”
Yup, sounds like fealty to me! What is there to say about such a statement? Horrifying. Likud has been against the peace process, against a Palestinian state, for the colonization of the West Bank. Do we have a foreign policy? Do we take sides on such matters? Do we take sides on minority rights in foreign countries? Are we the strongest country in the world, or do we get dragged around by racist biblical colonialists half a world away? What did we just do in Serbia and Kosovo–exercise our power to establish a Muslim state. But in this part of the world we have had no independent power to say what is right and wrong, for 60 years…
The columnist who wrote the piece is Dana Milbank, who in 2006 suggested that Walt and Mearsheimer are Nazis for talking about something called “the Israel lobby.” When Milbank cites “fealty to Israel” and describes security guards with Israeli accents, it’s hard to tell how ironic he is being. I think he is impish; and is trying himself to marginalize Obama without coming out and saying so.
This is bad news for Obama but maybe good for America. If Obama is going down on this issue, there will at last be, I vouchsafe, a robust debate over our Israel policy.
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/03/apparently-with.html
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/03/apparently-with.html
The Rev. Mr. Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country” somehow managed to leave the holy Homeland out of sight almost entirely: “a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
Ah, America, who can know thee that knoweth not that in which Levantine conflicts are primarily rooted?
(Golly, what tripe!)
It’s regrettable that one so notorious as BHO has recently become should be so ignorant, yet it is not as if he supposes the Middle East to actually matter. My view sees his campaign baloney as rooted primarily in what might be labeled the Chicagoland School of Foreign Policy, which dates back to Robert R. McCormick and beyond. Abroad is a very long way off in Illinois, so anybody can make up stories about it with impunity. The late colonel used to enjoy stories with Brit villains picking on poor noble Paddy; the senatorito of 2008 happens to like stories of stalwart heroes in league against the perverse and hateful. De gustibus, don’t you know?
Then there’s the claim that this one passage was “completely out of character with the rest of the address.” I think not. The “perverse and hateful” bit dwindles into unimportance once you grasp that BHO undertakes to be a stalwart ally contra mundum. As to WHY the comers come, who cares? What does it matter?
Look on the sunny side: BHO stands firm with M. Ehud Olmert — and presumably with M. Olmert’s successors hereafter — against all comers, just as he stands firm with the Rev. Mr. Jeremiah Wright. Why, the whole oration just goes to illustrate what the two words “stalwart allies” mean!
BHO does not ally himself with either of these beleaguered paladins uncritically, to be sure, but it certainly looks as if the only criticism he takes much cognizance of is his own.
(( Apart from Prof. Dr. Martin Peretz of Harvard and the New Republic, I have yet to learn of a single Hyperzionist who trusts this guy half an inch. They may be well advised not to. How stalwartly supported do you suppose the Reverend Wright is feeling at the moment? ))
Happy days.
I thought this thread was about Obama. Other than Timothy’s, every single post was about Israel. Like it was written in the Protocols of Zion, it always come down to those sly old Jews.
You’re writing in bad faith, truesdell, as shown by your reference to the protocols, so it’s a waste of time responding to you, but I have a minute to kill.
Obama gave a good speech on race relations–the part which stuck out like a sore thumb was where he chose to make a gratuitous comment about Israel and how radical Islam is the root cause of the problems there. Obama knows better, and the fact that he is willing to tell a blatant lie about this means he can’t be trusted if he thinks telling a lie is the safest way to proceed. That’s, of course, typical of politicians, and Obama might be better than most, but he’s still a politician, not a saint. Not remotely a saint.
I also don’t think he was fair to Wright in other ways–the fact is that Wright overstates the case, but there is much about America and American foreign policy which should make any decent person ashamed, and again, Barack is too much the politician to admit this.
Helena disappoints me too. There are too many progressives far too willing to give Obama a pass when he says despicable things. He needs to feel pressure like any other politician, not be treated as the messiah.
Sigh … Obama is just another politician pretending not to be. Can anyone show me where he vigorously opposed Bush’s policies in Iraq AFTER he entered the Senate, as opposed to before?
Fact is, he didn’t. Why? Because he was planning to run for president as it turned out, and was keeping all his political options open.
Same with his race relations speech. He didn’t make it until he was forced to by the networks screening the Rev Wright footage.
Obama is an attractive candidate, for sure, but let’s not get carried away thinking he’s any different to Clinton and McCain.
“Jim Haygood” Oh no “world peace”
Do not play with words by mixing ME, Islam and Barak Obama and his godfather pastor Wright.
This is just USA elections game if pastor Wright have these view where he was and why he kept silent for those years as he pastor, why he did not speck out in US society?
Is he apart of his believe should tell the truth all the truth or he hiding himself and just figure out its time to speak.
doesn’t matter here just take a close look to the churches in US who followed each one its not hard to find some if not all completely Black or completely white its just make no senesce telling that there is no racism in US even within church level.
As for Obama don’t be happy for him no candidacy in US get top without full support of Israeli lobby. Otherwise his road will very hard to climb the final race wait the coming days will tell and you will find how support he can give to Israel.
The history of US support very clear full support to Israel despite the time there are small differences but don’t rush to wrong conclusions.
I think that Truesdell is absolutely correct. The speech was Obama’s attempt to save his political ass, not about Israel. Yet that is what the majority of people here latched onto.
It is much more disturbing to me that so many seem to relate to the speech itself (i.e. the rhetoric) rather than what stands behind it. It was pretty much a no-brainer for Obama to try and turn the Wright affair into a rhetorical platform from which to preach about multi-culturalism and good relations between the races. Who, after all, can argue with that? Does that, in and of itself, make him a “leader”? I think not.
For the record, asserting that a candidate requires the full support of the “Israel Lobby” or, for that matter, needs to make “concessions” (and why is it a concession, and not what the candidate really believes?) to some un-named “strongly-Likud” (whatever that means) people, comes distrubingly close to arguments based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. I would point out that many candidates did not have such support or make such such concessions in the past (the father of the current President comes to mind), yet still managed to be elected.
Philip Weiss writes well about this issue on his blog in a post entitled “Apparently Without Irony, Washington Post Says Jewish Advocates Demand that Obama Show ‘Fealty to Israel'”:
“The debate became a rout, the Post columnist averred, in which the advocates for Hillary and McCain “used their time to raise doubts about Obama’s fealty to Israel.”
http://www.philipweiss.org/
Quelle surprise that the journalist is none other than self-appointed “gatekeeper” (as he described himself, without irony, to Ray Suarez on NewsHour recently) than Dana Milbank!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/17/AR2008031702440.html
Ann Lewis, representing Hilary Clinton at the debate described by Milbank had this to say:
“The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.”
Am I alone in finding the implications of this statement troubling?
JES, you and truesdell aren’t interested in fair criticism. Yeah, some people overstate the power of the Israel lobby. Sometimes they do so out of antisemitism. But there’s obviously an Israel lobby, which obviously pressures American politicians on the subject of Israel, and Obama is a prime example of this and it’s not antisemitic to say this. I think some attribute more power to the lobby than it actually possesses, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t exert influence. Obama knows better than to ignore Israel’s responsibility for some of the problems in the Middle East, but he has to pretend Israel is totally innocent and it’s all the fault of radical Islamists. A fairminded person, as Obama claims to be, would spread the blame on both sides.
As for Republicans, there is also, of course, a Saudi lobby. But I doubt a Republican candidate today could get the nomination without pretending, as Obama and Clinton and McCain all do, that Israel is without sin.
Expressing criticism without disafirming them. What a beautiful concept Helena identified in the speech, and how nice it would be if all the sad Islam-can-do-no-wrong America-no-right crowd in this forum would apply it. Just take a minute to reread the bias and hatred you write. For Salah I understand, the poor thing grew up, fought, and failed in the Iraqi swamp. But others, what is your excuse? Ran out of Prozac?
Donald, to begin by accusing people of not being interested in fair criticism is interesting. Who here is? Are you?
That aside, I don’t think that anyone denies the existiance of an Israel lobby with a small “l”. It is perfectly legitimate that their should be one. Further, it is your assumption, rather than a fact, that anyone who provides fair criticism of those who go on about the “Lobby” (with a captial “L”) are automatically accusing anyone of anti-Semitism.
But apart from all of this, you have amply made my case. You have essentially pointed out your belief that Obama does not tell the truth. It is therefore the speech that is important, and you somehowreally know what lies behind the words and who the real candidate is. In other words, you’re saying that Obama is really “fair minded”, but a liar nevertheless.
To all fans!
Don’t miss the sequel!
The policy conferente, june 2008!
Brought to you by AIPAC:
http://www.aipac.org/about_AIPAC/Learn_About_AIPAC/2841_8230.asp
According to JES, comparisons to the “Learned Protocols of Zion” constitute fair criticism, and is in no way intended to impute antisemitisim.
Donald can rest his case.
“Apparently Without Irony, Washington Post Says Jewish Advocates Demand that Obama Show ‘Fealty to Israel'”
The story continues: supporters of Israel are rising against Obama, there is a major push this week to destroy his candidacy. Today’s Washington Post reports on a debate yesterday arranged by United Jewish Committees in D.C. among Jewish advocates for Hillary, Obama, and McCain. The debate became a rout, the Post columnist averred, in which the advocates for Hillary and McCain “used their time to raise doubts about Obama’s fealty to Israel.”
Philip Weiss, March 18, 2008 on his Mondoweiss blog
That’s right “No Preference”. See, you’re getting smarter all the time!
Tell me “doonga”, did any of the speakers or those in attendance use the phrase “fealty to Israel”, or was that Milbank’s commentary?
Milbank is the poster boy for Israel lobby MSM journalism so it is hard to imagine he meant any ill will to the light unto nations in his choice of phrasing.
“doonga”, I wasn’t aware that Dana Milbank is a “poster boy”. But that’s not the point. The phrasing “fealty to Israel” was apparently not uttered by anyone at the event in question, and it is rather disingenous to attribute this as some sort of fact – whether this comes from Milbank, Philip Weiss or one “doonga”.
JES-
You’re not.