Jim Haygood read Alice Walker’s oblation to Obama in the Guardian more closely than I did and pointed out her important comment re Israel/Palestine:
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour
to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the US to cease acting as
if they don’t understand what is going on. But most of all I want
someone with the confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend", and
this Obama has shown he can do.
I love that: the people of the U.S. acting as if they don’t understand what’s going on. Also interesting: on the Guardian message board under this piece, most of the comments seem to be about the Palestinians.
In this context I’d cite Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s angry letter of a year ago to New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, which was published by Time Magazine yesterday on-line. Wright was hot that he gave two hours of time to Kantor re Obama, and a short critical piece was all that resulted (at first anyway; Kantor later did a longer, prescient, and somewhat less critical piece). Anyway, Wright brought Jewish religious issues into his argument. He noted that Kantor is Jewish; and suggested too that the Times is a Jewish paper…
Out of a two-hour conversation with you about Barack’s spiritual journey and my protesting to you that I had not shaped him nor formed him, that I had not mentored him or made him the man he was, even though I would love to take that credit, you did not print any of that. When I told you, using one of your own Jewish stories from the Hebrew Bible as to how God asked Moses, “What is that in your hand?,” that Barack was like that when I met him. Barack had it “in his hand.” Barack had in his grasp a uniqueness in terms of his spiritual development that one is hard put to find in the 21st century, and you did not print that….
Maybe it was my faith in the Jewish Holy Day of Roshashana. Maybe it
was my being caught up in the euphoria of the Season of Lent; but
whatever it is or was, I was sadly mistaken. There is no repentance on
the part of The New York Times.
Intense guy, Wright. Smart, too; those lines about Obama’s spiritual development are beautiful and helpful. I wonder if Wright leaked that letter to Time Magazine. Some day he’s going to have a lot to say about all this. Right now he’s wrapped up in a carpet on the South Side of Chicago, and taped with duct tape.
