Although the United States was created out of a classic anti-colonial struggle, D'Souza is talking about the anti-western struggle in Africa; he's talking about dark, "black" people struggling against European "white" people.
But what D'Souza is not interested in is the fact any discussion of the third world struggle to throw off European colonialism naturally raises the specter of other classic anti-colonial struggles like Vietnam and, while we're at it, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last week presented an interesting moment in this kind of high-wire theater. Obama was in Jakarta, Indonesia, a country with the largest Muslim population in the world and where he had lived as a kid. For some reason, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ended up in New York and in New Orleans, where he made a speech. There was a testy exchange between the two in the papers.
Netanyahu was raised as a kid and schooled in the upscale suburb of Elkins Park outside Philadelphia; he has many friends in the American right. The timing of the spat was almost too good to be coincidental. Post midterm election, here you had the American-raised Israeli prime minister speaking in the US in quite cocky language about settlement building in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, while the American President was touring in the world's most populace Islamic nation where he had been raised and schooled (indoctrinated?) as a kid.
In a bizarre way, especially if one swallowed all the right wing garbage, the white, suburban Netanyahu was more "American" than Obama.
President Obama has no one but himself to blame for the corner he has painted himself into. He has totally dismissed and abandoned the antiwar left, his so-called "base." He has refused to take a tough, left-of-center FDR posture vis-a-vis the right. He seems to avoid conflict.
This puts him squarely into the tragic mold of Lyndon Johnson where honorable domestic reform ambitions are trumped and destroyed by the decision to sustain a controversial foreign war. Such wars, to include Iraq and Afghanistan, are sustained by the erroneous determination that they're not in fact the "neocolonial" militarist adventures Barack Obama Sr., Kwame Nkrumah and Edward Said wrote about.
For my money and for my vote in this game called democracy, I would echo something said about Ronald Reagan as he began to receive criticism. "Let Reagan be Reagan."
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