As you probably know already, protesters disrupted an Obama speech in Florida and held up a banner saying, “What about the black community, Obama?” Marc Ambinder reports the meat of the exchange here.
The thing to note about these protesters is that they do not represent the black community — they represent the Uhuru Movement. Their banner sporting this URL made it clear. As I’ve stated here, here and here, the Uhuru Movement is an extremist cult run by Omali Yeshitela and the African Peoples Socialist Party, which enjoys the propaganda support of dead prez and others in the hip-hop activist circuit.
Omali and his minions aren’t simply disappointed in Obama. They’ve reviled his pluralist, democratic worldview from the very outset. Omali holds just about every black leader in the world, including Nelson Mandela, in the highest contempt. His group has fliers plastered all over Philadelphia accusing Mayor Nutter, who is black, of conducting a “war against the African community” in the city.
Yeshitelism, the Uhuru Movement doctrine, dictates not only that all blacks be referred to as Africans, but that all African nationalities are colonial creations and should therefore be abolished. Omali has made his support for revolutionary violence in Africa abundantly clear. I’ve seen him speak, and I’ve seen a roomful of guilty white liberals get intimidated into a standing ovation before the man even opened his mouth.
Obama did the right thing by engaging the young Uhuru protester in the flesh. But from here on he should steadfastly refuse to be baited by this authoritarian fringe group. And no one should conflate its standpoint with that of “the black community.”
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