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The Irony of Obama’s Boycott

America’s first black president refused to attend a U.N. conference on racism.

By Salim Muwakkil

The Obama administration’s boycott of the United Nations’ Durban Review Conference in Geneva this month seems decidedly at odds with his vow of open diplomacy. The four-day conference was convened to evaluate progress toward the goals set by the U.N.’s World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. That conference ended… return to article

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    As long as President Obama opposes Reparations for slave descendants, like previous wicked U.S. Presidents including Bush and Clinton, he is blocking justice for the victims of the worst holocaust in human history.  We the Afrodescendants have suffered more than 100 million casualties during more than 400 years of brutal bondage in the western hemisphere.  Our oppressors did not liberate us when they ended chattel slavery in 1865.  They continued to impose ethnocide and forced assimilation on us.  That is why the late Justice Thurgood Marshall publicly declared late in life that “we as a people are still not free.”  That is also why the late esteemed historian John Hope Franklin estimated that white America owes slave descendants $10 trillion in Reparations. 
    However, Reparations means far more than financial restitution for centuries of chattel slavery and subsequent decades of meticulously engineered oppression.  As the Honorable Silis Muhammad has repeatedly observed in interventions at the United Nations, Reparations means Restoration for all 250 million Afrodescendants in the West.  We demand our Human Rights, including the right to an education in our mother tongue, and complete Reparations.
    Sincerely,
    Senator Malik Al-Arkam
    www.allforreparations.org

    United States Posted by mathrise on Apr 30, 2009 at 5:12 PM

    I agree with Mr. Malik Al-Arkam, with one stipulation:

    No Reparations without Repatriation.

    Upon agreeing to accept a Congressionally-determined sum equivalent to the promised 40 acres and a mule, any current American citizen of proven slave ancestry, who chooses to opt into the Reparations Program, would be issued a check for said amount from the US Treasury Department, along with a one-way plane ticket to the nation of their assumed ancestry—or whatever nation would take them as a citizen. Before boarding the plane they would sign papers formally renouncing their US citizenship once-and-for-all, and be henceforth treated like any other foreign visitor to this country, requiring a visa, passport, and clean criminal record to return.

    Or, if they choose to opt out, they can instead live like the rest of us do—going to work, paying our taxes, snitching on killers and thugs, keeping our neighborhoods and streets clean, our homes repaired, our children educated and respectful of others, and politically involved in the life of our country.

    Because now we know that anyone who takes responsibility for their own actions, works hard, hits the books, gets an education, and learns how to properly speak the language, can grow up to be the President of the United States of America.

    United States Posted by Gileadite on May 7, 2009 at 8:33 PM
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