Black America can afford Obama unconditionally
Re: “Can black Americans afford Obama?” June 10
President Obama does not share either the African historic heritage or the civil rights struggle experience of black America. The American slave trade came from West African nations, from where most black Americans trace their ancestry. Obama’s people, by contrast, came from Kenya, an East African country, a highly unlikely source of slaves to the American trade experience.
Furthermore, when Obama was born in 1961, his mother soon afterward hustled him off first to England, and then to Indonesia, and he did not return to the United States until 1979. By that time, the black American civil rights struggle had reached its zenith and was in a state of decline. In any case, Obama was never a part of it, since most of the relevant landmark civil rights legislation had been passed before his return to the states.
We all should stop thinking of Africa as a monolithic political and cultural entity. Instead, it is a huge continent of many diverse nations. So even if Obama does fail in his presidency, the failure of an East African does not necessarily spell political doom for the American descendants of West Africa.
Lawrence K. Marsh
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A balanced look at Helen Thomas’ comments
Re: “Helen Thomas retires, thankfully,” June 8
Cal Thomas has very little room to pontificate, as he did in his comment on Helen Thomas’ remarks on Israel, about anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, or anti-anything else. His own commentary a while ago on the crisis in the Catholic Church played so fast and loose with the facts as to border on anti-Catholic slander.
Helen Thomas said that Israelis should go back to their homes in Germany, Poland, and the United States; Cal Thomas wonders if Helen Thomas would go back home to Lebanon, where her parents came from.
It is preposterous to compare the arrival of immigrants in the United States to having the world’s colonial powers plant a whole people and build a whole new nation on top of one’s homeland, as happened to the people of Palestine.
Cal Thomas refers to Helen Thomas’ criticism of anything Israel has ever done to defend itself, as he put it. Since he also brought up the Holocaust, let me remind him of this: The Nazi regime of Germany overran Poland, and set up its own new order.
When the Polish underground mounted resistance to this new order, making life difficult for them, the occupational forces would routinely refer to them as “bandits.” Is the moral picture the same? It seems to me that it could reasonably be argued either way (I’m not going to try), with no anti-Semitism whatsoever.
Helen Thomas said nothing anti-Semitic. She expressed what she probably realized was an unrealistic wish. Unfortunately for her, she crossed the wrong people.
Stephen Kosciesza
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Scientific evidence bests religious explanation
Re: “Credo: Christopher Hitchens,” June 6 and “Hitchens’ distorted reasoning misses truth,” from readers, June 9
Taking issue with Christopher Hitchens’ atheism, letter-writer John Naughton says that the complexity of the human body, including its capabilities to reproduce and heal, could not have evolved from simple unaided matter. He offers a solution that God created mankind. This is supposed to resolve all inquiry on how our species came to be, yet it leaves open a new question: Where did God come from?
If we are left having to accept that either evolutionary forces or God was always present at mankind’s beginning, why not accept the one for which there is some scientific evidence?
David Hayes
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