April 4, 2008

By Ted Belman

I watch FOX NEWS regularly. One of the commentators that I have come to respect is Juan Williams who happens to be black. He has been a severe critic of Barak Obama.

The WSJ has just published an Op-Ed by him entitled Obama and King in which he contrasts them. He might have entitled it “Obama is no King”.

[..] Now comes Barack Obama, a black man and a plausible national leader, who appeals across racial lines. But to his black and white supporters, Mr. Obama increasingly represents different things. [..]

Last March in Selma, Ala., Mr. Obama appeared on the verge of breaking away from the merchants of black grievance and victimization. At a commemoration of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights, he spoke in a King-like voice. He focused on traditions of black sacrifice, idealism and the need for taking personal responsibility for building strong black families and communities. He said black people should never “deny that its gotten better,” even as the movement goes on to improve schools and provide good health care for all Americans. He then challenged black America, by saying that “government alone can’t solve all those problems . . . it is not enough just to ask what the government can do for us — it’s important for us to ask what we can do for ourselves.”

Mr. Obama added that better education for black students begins with black parents visiting their children’s teachers, as well as turning off the television so children can focus on homework. He expressed alarm over the lack of appreciation for education in the black community: “I don’t know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs were something white. We’ve got to get over that mentality.” King, he added later, believed that black America has to first “transform ourselves in order to transform the world.”

But as his campaign made headway with black voters, Mr. Obama no longer spoke about the responsibility and the power of black America to appeal to the conscience and highest ideals of the nation. He no longer asks black people to let go of the grievance culture to transcend racial arguments and transform the world.

He has stopped all mention of government’s inability to create strong black families, while the black community accepts a 70% out-of-wedlock birth rate. Half of black and Hispanic children drop out of high school, but he no longer touches on the need for parents to convey a love of learning to their children. There is no mention in his speeches of the history of expensive but ineffective government programs that encourage dependency. He fails to point out the failures of too many poverty programs, given the 25% poverty rate in black America.

And he chooses not to confront the poisonous “thug life” culture in rap music that glorifies drug use and crime.

Instead the senator, in a full political pander, is busy excusing Rev. Wright’s racial attacks as the right of the Rev.-Wright generation of black Americans to define the nation’s future by their past. He stretches compassion to the breaking point by equating his white grandmother’s private concerns about black men on the street with Rev. Wright’s public stirring of racial division.

And he wasted time in his Philadelphia speech on race by saying he can’t “disown” Rev. Wright any more than he could “disown the black community.” No one has asked him to disown Rev. Wright. Only in a later appearance on “The View” television show did he say that he would have left the church if Rev. Wright had not retired and not acknowledged his offensive language. [..]

Obama is no King when it comes to Israel and Zionism either.
ZOA Honors Zionist Martin Luther King, Zionist & Fierce Critic of Anti-Semitism