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Monday, February 11, 2008

I guess Obama has to apologize every time a black man commits a crime, too
Posted by Jill | 7:54 AM
A friend e-mailed me this morning informing me that some conservative Jews of his acquaintance are calling Barack Obama a "Farrakhan supporter." I hadn't heard anything like this, so I decided to take a look at where this might come from. And I found it in this January 15 column by WaPo's own Wank-o-Matic, Richard Cohen:

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan.

Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan "epitomized greatness." For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler -- "They helped him get the Third Reich on the road." His history is a rancid stew of lies.

It's important to state right off that nothing in Obama's record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama's top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances.

Fine. But where I differ with Axelrod and, I assume, Obama is that praise for an anti-Semitic demagogue is not a minor difference or an intrachurch issue. The Obama camp takes the view that its candidate, now that he has been told about the award, is under no obligation to speak out on the Farrakhan matter. It was not Obama's church that made the award but a magazine. This is a distinction without much of a difference. And given who the parishioner is, the obligation to speak out is all the greater. He could be the next American president. Where is his sense of outrage?

Any praise of Farrakhan heightens the prestige of the leader of the Nation of Islam. For good reasons and bad, he is already admired in portions of the black community, sometimes for his efforts to rehabilitate criminals. His anti-Semitism is either not considered relevant or is shared, particularly his false insistence that Jews have played an inordinate role in victimizing African Americans.

In this, Farrakhan stands history on its head. It was Jews who disproportionately marched for civil rights and, in Mississippi, died for that cause. Farrakhan and, in effect, Wright, despoil the graves of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and, of course, their black colleague James Chaney.

I can even see how someone, maybe even Obama, could dismiss Farrakhan as a pest, a silly man pushing a silly cause that poses no real threat to the Jewish community. Still, history tells us that anti-Semitism is not to be trifled with. It is a botulism of the mind.


So let me see if I have this straight. The minister at Obama's church has daughters who publish a magazine that gives an award to Lewis Farrakhan. And Barack Obama is responsible for this....how?

I realize that Richard Cohen sees everything through the prism of anti-Semitism, and while I am very well aware that anti-Semitism does exist (having been asked in all seriousness when I was a freshman in college where my horns were, since I was the first Jew said person had ever met and she'd always heard we had horns), to extrapolate that into some responsibility that Barack Obama has for the deeds of his pastor's children is ridiculous.

Just for the heck of it, I did a Google news search on Lewis Farrakhan to see if somehow I'd missed some return of Farrakhan to prominence. The only thing I found was this Powerline article, which does nothing but give us a taste of the kind of "Obama is an Islamist terrorist mole seeking to take over our government" crap that he can expect if he becomes the Democratic nominee -- crap that he'd better be prepared, in all his "reach across the aisle" magnanimity, to deal with.

Is Farrakhan even a major factor anymore?

This isn't the first time I've seen the Black/Jewish conflict rear its ugly head yet again. My own mother has expressed fear at what "the blacks" will do if "one of their own" becomes president. As I wrote last week, the roots of this conflict are in the notion that one group or another, whether women, black people, or Jews, have some kind of patent on suffering, or that we have to rank their relative degree of put-upon-ness. I don't hear any black people claiming that Jews are trying to prevent their guy from getting the nomination (at least not yet...if the superdelegates decide it for Hillary, who is not Jewish, that may change). The only kind of ethnic responsibility I'm seeing so far is from a Jewish columnist insisting that Barack Obama has some kind of responsibility for the actions of his pastor's daughter.

As I pointed out to my friend, the politically conservative Jews who are going to believe this are the ones who subscribe to the PNAC neocon fantasy; the ones willing to sell their souls to the Christofascist Zombie Brigade™ in return for financial and military support for Israel; the ones who aren't going to vote for a Democrat anyway.

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