Yackety Yak Israel - Buzz from big white city

What can we learn from Obama [emancipation replay?]

Obama's "change" book... is it going to work? or be enough?
So the election campaign is going full force in the US. Barack Obama is one of the most articulate and relevant candidates in a long time. His "change we can believe in" campaign has ignited the imagination and stirred the spirits of Americans like never before. But you ask: "what does this have to do with Israel? or Tel Aviv?" ~ well, I think P L E N T Y ! If we think in terms of time and history, Barack Obama is the heir of a long chain of black reformers going back to the American slave era. Some do not like to bring up this dark period in American history, but bear with me and keep on reading. I would like to equate the dark time in American history to what the Palestinians seem to be having now. Mostly because of politics and somewhat because of personal ideology the Palestinians seem to feel like the whole world is against them and that the Israelis are heading the lynch mob. Well, what do you think it was like for the blacks of south before the American Civil War? I don't think that the Palestinians can hold a candle to them. As I follow the history from Abraham Lincoln, Fredirick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. -- fast forward to Barack Obama, you see how the treatment of blacks has gone through ups and downs and seemed to be a series of endless disapointments. Does this sound like the story for Gazans??? Of course it does. But everyone wants the Palestinians to have the same status, opportunity, and lifestyle of the afluent blacks in the good ole' US of A. Of course we all want this, but we seem not to want to go through the "process" or the "change". You may remember that the blacks in the US had the Black Panthers? To most white Americans this was downright terrorism perpretrated by a minority group that seem not to take reponsibility for their own state of affairs.
The point I am making is that change can come. Sometimes slowly and sometimes dramatically. Barack Obama's position and personality as a change vehical is credible only because he does follow a long line of black change ideologist. His ideas and words are an echo of Lincooln's and King's ideas, but this time he is pitting one group against another on an economic and political scale, not on race or religion. He does clearly state that things can not go as they have been going up to now. There are plenty of "signs" that he has a point. I guess he is trying to say, just like the people in Israel and in most of the Middle East: "the era of wars and political terrorism is over". It's hard to say this while the World Trade Center towers in New York are still "a hole in the ground" and the headstones in Israeli grave yards are still white and fresh. It's hard to tell the Iraqis that a dictator is gone and they need to figure out how to live differently. It's hard to tell Iranians that Israel is not going to volley a nuclear bomb at them as they have expected for a long time, probably just because they are fundamentally Muslim. All these ideas can't be changed in a month or a year or even a decade. So I hope to see the Palestinian King or Obama some time in the next 20 years. If you want it faster go get him -/- she is probably living in Gaza or Lebanon and is doing her wash just about now. Or maybe she is on the beach in Quatar (OK I had to get that one in).

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For these Americans who bristle at my use of "black" to describe the now popularly accepted "African American" please don't write any comments, they are not going to tell me anything I don't know. Blacks has been used in American English for a long time, before that the term "Negro" was used from the Spanish and Portugese. The sad thing about a loss of historical perspective is how quickly people forget that things actually "got better". I like to point out that life has "changed" for many, not just the "African Americans". Without the people who change them, who said the very short phrases [of the people, by the people, for the people / I have a dream] that encapsulated a big idea into a moto, probably the change would have taken much longer. So read, don't judge (me) and think for yourself. (if you got a good article, write to me :-)