A friend alerted me to the following post and AOL message boards that purports to be about some weird sort of Israeli Vatican connected plot to assassinate Barack Obama: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com. I sincerely hope the post and messages are false pieces of Internet alarmism. This is a very interesting post and, if anywhere near true, extremely disturbing. There are probably numerous ultra-right and not-so-ultra right haters and race supremacist forces out there who wish to do nothing but harm to Obama simply because he is black and is a black liberal and seen by them as threatening to the continued white domination of pristine American culture, its physical face and its long sustained Eurocentric civic values
Whether true or not, the post is a chilling reminder of the risks one takes to be a world leader. Major political leaders put their very safety and lives on the line all the time. As they do they run extreme risks and many resources must be brought to bear in insuring their safety. Yet, national leaders remain vulnerable to attempts at harm and injury. This is especially true in nations with popular traditions wherein the national political norms allow everyday folks or constituents to come close to and actually touch or embrace leaders.
To run for president of the USA, or any other modern nation-state, one must be bold and brave and have a great capacity for leadership. There is no better leadership test for Barack Obama than this fact of running and being nominated for this highest of offices. Young Americans who are growing up in this period of history, where an emphasis is being placed on multiculturalism, need look no farther than the presence of a black man running for the nation's chief public position.
On this, the most important of national security interests, John McCain and his Republican spin masters are dead wrong: Barack Obama, as one of the most courageous men in America, has taken the issue of leadership to its highest level. The very premise of national security leadership constitutionally depends on having a live, healthy executive leader; a president and commander-in-chief of armed US military might. Any plot or assassination scenario involving the top American leader is itself the gravest concern to all US security forces.
As the ultimate American pioneer, save for Hillary Clinton and Cynthia McKinney's experiences on the gender front, Obama is the out-front face of a new type of American demographical presence at the pinnacle of elective office. Obama's Audacity of Hope must also be considered audacious in as far as his bravery in stepping out front to be fully examined in public by supporters and enemies alike.
In ways patently outside of John McCain's abilities as the usual white, rich and old male type leader--who himself has well earned medals for his bravery as a POW in Vietnam--Obama is the lone big fish in the biggest fish bowl on earth. He is big because unlike all other presidential contenders, past or present, he is an African American leader in a nation that still unabashedly defines its heritage, its still de facto segregated living conditions, and near future along racial lines. The racial division is still the most insidious because it trumps gender, ethnic, class, ideological and religious divides to get at the very core of what it means to be truly American.
The one drop of black blood and an Afro-Kenyan father defines Obama as black even in the face of having a dedicated white mom and loving white relatives. To be white in America is to have a white pop and mom and look white in appearance whatever that means. It is not enough to have one parent who is white.
Moreover, even at this late date some erstwhile Democrats in America's labor movement just cannot fathom a working class vote for Obama just because he is black. Same for some women who claim their love for Hillary Clinton, yet disdain her politics of Democratic unity and will likely vote for McCain.
As such, Obama is a very big and inviting target for all kinds of haters, secret plotters, and others whose ugly legacy we are still trying to uncover 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. All the investigations into his death have not revealed the truth to his demise.
But more diabolically sinister than even the organized, up front white supremacist haters --- the aforementioned ultra-right and not-so-ultra right haters and race supremacist sectarians --- is the spectre of state envisioned and sponsored terrorism, subterfuge, intrigue and plots or actual assassinations of allied or enemy leaders. For state agencies to actually plot or carry out an assassination and then blame the act on readily available white right-wing patsies, whose history of hate-mongering attacks against blacks and others makes them so obvious, is ingenious. The subterfuge could be expected to work on an unsuspecting, patently naive American public that has been conditioned to view white supremacist sects as the central font of racism, while clearly not recognizing that racism is and has been --- since the European subjugation of Native Americans and the horrific enslavement of Africans --- an endemic characteristic to the growth and enshrinement of Western civilization's global control over the Third World and people of color worldwide. Racism is the prop on which the foundations of Western might and wealth has leaned since the Columbian misadventures in the Caribbean Sea.
We should know that state sponsored terrorism in the form of taking out an allied or enemy leader is also a very old covert operations, Machiavellian type strategy used by many national intelligence agencies across the globe, the CIA, NSA and the various U.S. military intelligence operations and Russia's FSB successor to the old Soviet Union's KGB included. The many CIA plot (s) to kill Fidel Castro (using exiled Cubans in Miama as fronts and pawns) is very old news, and while the CIA has been publicly forced to not use assassination as a strategy against foreign leaders, who knows what CIA operatives are actually doing in deep cover secret out there?
Whether the Mossad, Shin Bet or Aman, the key national Israeli intelligence agencies were actually involved in the Denver incidence relative to Obama is a matter of pure speculation. Are there some in the Israeli establishment who feel that there national interests would be threatened with an Obama election? Certainly, there are those and yet there are a host of others who feel his views are middle of the road and quite acceptable as regards Israel's survival and prosperity. As we read Israeli sources like Haaretz.com or national American publications like the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and Washington Post (or even the Philadelphia Tribune) we can gain some insight into the pros and cons of Obama's acceptability to audiences and constituencies concerned about Middle eastern issues in general the viability of Israel in particular. On balance, what I have seen for the past few months is a very favorable reception of Obama's views.
The Vatican's supposed role in the background of all this first harks back to the then emerging Protestant-Roman Catholic split even before Martin Luther's big break with the Pope in the 1500's. Secondly, we must remember the virulent anti-Semitism of medieval European Christians and the numerous pogroms against the Jews that occurred between the disaporic scattering from the Roman Empire of 70 CE and up to and including the German (Christian Protestant and Catholic) led holocaust of European Jewry.
Although I am Muslim, I graduated from Creighton University, a Jesuit university in Omaha. On the undergrad level I majored in political science and philosophy and was exposed to a whole slew of literature on the mutual medieval to modern animosities between the two main and rival European Christian sects (I left out the Orthodox-Roman Catholic split that occurred in about 1,000 CE). The Protestant-Roman Catholic schism and lingering animosities still infect intra-church relations today much as the animosities between Sunni and Shi'ite adherents to Islam animates Muslim politics.
Thus the speculation itself may be nothing more than the wild imaginings of bloggers who love to engage Internet audiences in all manner of scandalous conspiracy theories. Or the speculation may be a way for white supremacists themselves to lay blame on Israeli forces for any injury or harm to Obama that they carry out. The supremacists are not stupid and are not merely the rag tag crowd of media hype. Behind the scenes lie super-sophisticated, deep cover, ultra-right operatives who are part of our own government's establishment or who work as independent contractors to government sources. One never really knows.
Or the speculation may have some bearing in truth. A thread of truth, if not anywhere near the whole truth, often underlies such speculation.
Whatever the case, we must listen and watch with eyes wide open to all reports. On top of this is the constant comfort of prayer for the safe passage of Michelle Obama's fearless husband as he continues his historic run towards the White House. Surely a new kind of demographic leadership in America is at the ready.
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