Posted on 08/20/2006 9:11:39 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Sen. Barack Obama started a two-week tour of Africa on Sunday with a visit to Nelson Mandela's former prison island, paying tribute to the "incredible courage, resilience and hopefulness" of the anti-apartheid movement.
The only black member of the U.S. Senate and one of the Democratic Party's rising stars, Obama said the two-hour visit to Robben Island made him realize that everyday worries in the United States were "fairly trivial stuff compared to the very elemental, basic struggle" of Mandela and other former inmates.
Obama's late father was a goat herder who went on to become a Harvard-educated government economist for his native Kenya.
The senator was guided around the island by Ahmed Kathrada, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 with Mandela and other leaders of the resistance to white racist rule.
Kathrada was classified as Indian which — according to apartheid's laws — made him superior to black South Africans. He was allowed to wear long trousers and socks and got bigger helpings of food.
Mandela, Sisulu and all the black detainees suffered the humiliation of wearing shorts and petty discrimination like not being allowed syrup or jam at breakfast, he said.
"It is a reminder of the extraordinary struggle that not only Mandela went through but people all over the world go through to obtain things that we take for granted," said Obama. "To stand in Mandela's cell and have a sense of the incredible courage, resilience and hopefulness of these men puts into perspective the work we do back home."
Obama said hopes his trip, which will include a trip to his father's home in Kenya, along with visits to Congo and Chad, will help improve ties between the United States and the continent, and give him a better perspective on problems such as HIV/ AIDS.
He is due to visit AIDS patients and meet activists in the impoverished township of Khayelitsha on Monday.
Barack Obama, U.S. Senator for Illinois, right, and former Robben Island prisoner, Achmat Kathrada, left, look through a window of former South African President Nelson Mandela's prison cell in Robben Island, Cape Town, South Africa, Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006. Obama is on a two week African Tour which started in Cape Town. (AP Photo/Obed Zilwa)
U.S. senator Barack Obama looks through the prison bars of former South African President Nelson Mandela's cell on Robben island in Cape Town, South Africa, August 20, 2006. REUTERS/Howard Burditt (SOUTH AFRICA)
Woman dressed in the colours of the ruling African National Congress and showing a portrait of former President Nelson Mandela attend a gathering in Pretoria, South Africa, as thousands of people, mainly women, marched to government headquarters Wednesday Aug. 9, 2006, in a festive re-enactment of a famed anti-apartheid protest by women against the old regime's racial segregation policies 50 years ago. The anniversary celebrations were tinged by the recognition that women in the new democratic South Africa are the worst hit by poverty, bear the brunt of the HIV/AIDS crisis and suffer from the world's highest rates of domestic violence and rape. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)
Is it just me, or does Obama look like he belongs there.
And the ANC was a Communist front whose goal was to destabilize and then overthrow a stable democracy.
From Marx to Mandela
By George Neumayr
American Prowler | February 4, 2003
So Nelson Mandela doesn't want America to win the war on terrorism. No surprise there. He didn't want America to win the Cold War either. Last September, he described America's Cold War decision to "arm and finance the mujahedin" against the Soviets one of America's "serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs."
The media have conveniently forgotten that Mandela was a hard-core Communist. He drank deeply at the well of anti-American Communist theory, and it has never left his system. Those astonished at his apologetics for Saddam Hussein -- "Israel has weapons of mass destruction" but Hussein doesn't, according to Mandela -- should remember that he has played defense for madmen and thugs before. His ramshackle South African government maintained ties with Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi. And long before that, he was responsible for a pamphlet called "How To Be A Good Communist" in which he praised the "genius" of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
America was one of the capitalist countries Mandela wanted the Soviets to trample. "The cause of Communism is the greatest and most arduous cause in the history of mankind," the pamphlet stated. "Our aim is to change the present world into a Communist world where there will be no exploiters and exploited, no oppressor and oppressed, no rich and poor." He thought a "Communist world is capable of attainment" -- since Communism had succeeded so brilliantly in the USSR, China and the Eastern Bloc. But it would require beating the hell out of capitalists: "the Communist movement still faces powerful enemies which must be crushed and wiped out from the face of the earth before a Communist world can be realized. Without a hard and bitter and long struggle against capitalism and exploitation, there can be no Communist world."
Is it a cheap shot to dig this up? No, because Mandela is still under the influence of one-world anti-American ideology. Now instead of wanting a Communist world government that dominates the U.S., he wants a U.N. world government to dominate it. In his mind, America is still an exploiter and oppressor in need of ideological correction. He said on Thursday that "if there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America." Mandela still sees Americans as capitalist pigs, evil enough to commit a "holocaust" for mere money -- "Iraq produces 64 percent of the oil in the world. What Bush wants is to get hold of that oil." (Iraq produces 5 percent of world oil exports, reports CNN.) Mandela even maintains, in his own disgraceful way, the old Soviet canard that America is a racist nation. America, Mandela says, is "undermining" the advance of world government because United Nations chief Kofi Annan is black. "They do not care. Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations is now a black man?" says Mandela.
The moral-equivalence babble that flowed from Mandela's mouth during the Cold War is being regurgitated on behalf of Hussein. Mandela has said that America must respect the "sovereignty" of Iraq. Did Mandela ever call on America to respect the sovereignty of racist apartheid South Africa? And if Saddam Hussein is sovereign, why isn't the United States? Mandela has no respect for the sovereignty of America, as he demands that America entrust its security to socialists at the U.N.
Bush is a leader "who cannot think properly," says Mandela, spoken like a chilling ideologue. So, according to Mandela, the U.N. must think for him. Even as Bush gives billions to AIDS victims in Africa, Mandela speaks of him as a demented and cruel child. Thankfully, Bush isn't taking him seriously. It is too bad that the world still does.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5884
Got lost?
Him and a few others . ;-)
There was NO difference in the way South Africa was run and any other sub-Sahara African country except that the dominate tribe was white. we ONLY opposed it BECAUSE it was white not the way it acted or we would have to oppose all the others.
people were doing all they could to get INTO the place.
Why is it that certain blacks are heroes to other blacks no matter their criminality?
lucky for us you have no power to do so. you ever lived outside the US?
Grooming for POTUS...
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