Last night I heard something too stupendous to be believed. I was in a Christian church serving the Arab community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, for a presentation on apartheid in Palestine. During the Q-and-A, a local Arab leader, Dr. Ahmad Jaber, said he had gotten a promise from Michael McMahon, the congressman-elect for New York's 13th District, that he would visit the West Bank to see for himself the apartheid conditions there.
I was quite cynical about this, and said that Senator Obama had first visited Ramallah in 2006 when he was touring the region with an AIPAC board member from Chicago. Surely the congressman would do the same thing.
Jaber insisted this was not the case. The Arab community of Bay Ridge is the second largest in the country, after Dearborn, MI, and it had worked hard for Obama and voted for him by over 3-1. It had made a difference in the victory of Democrat McMahon, who won the congressional seat now occupied by disgraced Republican Vito Fossella by nearly two-to-one. And Jaber stated that McMahon had promised the Arab community he would go to Palestine.
There's a time to be cynical, and a time to have faith… People at the event last night said our country is slowly changing.
