On Nov 5, 2012, at 8:16 AM, c b wrote:
"Giggles"
Still giggling?
"In April of this year, Saadiq Long, a 43-year-old African-American Muslim who now lives in Qatar, purchased a ticket on KLM Airlines to travel to Oklahoma, the state where he grew up. Long, a 10-year veteran of the US Air Force, had learned that the congestive heart failure from which his mother suffers had worsened, and she was eager to see her son. He had last seen his mother and siblings more than a decade ago, when he returned to the US in 2001, and spent months saving the money to purchase the ticket and arranging to be away from work. The day before he was to travel, a KLM representative called Long and informed him that the airlines could not allow him to board the flight. That, she explained, was because the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had placed Long on its "no-fly list", which bars him from flying into his own country.
Long has now spent the last six months trying to find out why he was placed on this list and what he can do to get off of it. He has had no success, unable to obtain even the most basic information about what caused his own government to deprive him of this right to travel.
(Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, 5/11)
> Giggles
>
> cb
>
> Angela Davis Has Lost Her Mind Over Obama
> Tue, 03/27/2012 - 22:32 — Glen Ford
>
> http://blackagendareport.com/content/angela-davis-lost-her-mind-over-obama
>
> A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
> Black Freedom Movement era icon Angela Davis tells people that Barack
> Obama “identifies with the Black radical tradition” – “as if
> everything he has written, said and done in national politics has not
> been a repudiation of the Black radical tradition.” In doing so, Prof.
> Davis “is repudiating herself, her history, her comrades – all in a
> foolish attempt to artificially graft a totally unworthy Barack Obama
> onto a place he not only does not belong, but most profoundly does not
> want to be.”
> Angela Davis Lost Her Mind Over Obama
> A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
> “Angela Davis says that Barack Obama is a man who identifies with the
> Black radical tradition.”
> The “delusional effect” that swept Black America with the advent of
> the First Black President has warped and weakened the mental powers of
> some of our most revered icons – and it has been painful to behold.
> Earlier this month, Angela Davis diminished herself as a scholar and
> thinker in a gush of nonsense about the corporate executive in the
> White House. The occasion was a conference on Empowering Women of
> Color, in Berkeley, California. Davis shared the stage with Grace Lee
> Boggs, the 96-year-old activist from Detroit. The subject was social
> transformation, but Davis suddenly launched into how wonderful it felt
> to see people “dancing in the streets” when Barack Obama was elected.
> She called that campaign a “victory, not of an individual, but
> of…people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a
> person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical
> tradition.”
> There was a hush in the room, as if in mourning of the death of brain
> cells. Angela Davis was saying that Barack Obama is a man who
> identifies with the Black radical tradition. She said it casually, as
> if Black radicalism and Obama were not antithetical terms; as if
> everything he has written, said and done in national politics has not
> been a repudiation of the Black radical tradition; as if his rejection
> of his former minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was not a thorough
> disavowal of the Black radical tradition. In his famous 2008 campaign
> speech in Philadelphia, Obama blamed such radicals for compounding the
> nation’s problems. He viewed people like Rev. Wright as having been
> mentally scarred by battles of long ago, who were unable to see the
> inherent goodness of America, as he did. This is the man who said he
> agreed with President Ronald Reagan, that the Sixties were
> characterized by “excesses.” Can anyone doubt that Obama considers the
> historical Angela Davis, herself, to be a part of the political
> “excesses” of the Sixties and early Seventies that he so deplores?
> “This is the man who said he agreed with President Ronald Reagan, that
> the Sixties were characterized by “excesses.”
> And that is the saddest part of the story. Angela Davis, who retired
> as a professor of the history of human consciousness, in 2008, seems
> not to be conscious of the fact that she is repudiating herself, her
> history, her comrades – all in a foolish attempt to artificially graft
> a totally unworthy Barack Obama onto the Black radical tradition – a
> place he not only does not belong, but most profoundly does not want
> to be. This is the guy who declared, at his first national broadcast
> opportunity, that “there is no Black America…only the United States of
> America.”
> How, then, did Angela Davis connect Barack Obama to the Black radical
> tradition? She didn't, because even an icon cannot do the impossible.
> Instead, Davis quickly told the crowd, in Berkeley, that “we need to
> figure out how to prevent somebody like Mitt Romney from getting
> elected.” But the vast majority of Black people are going to wind up
> voting for Obama, anyway, because he's not white and Republican. There
> is no need to pollute the proud tradition of Black radicalism by
> dipping the corporate warmonger, Obama, into the historical mix. In
> doing so, Professor Davis has soiled herself, and done a terrible
> injustice to Black history and tradition. And, the biggest shame of
> all is, she has diminished herself and insulted our people for the
> sake of a president who doesn't give a damn for their history or their
> future. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to
> BlackAgendaReport.com.
> BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
> Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com.
>
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