Clinton Whitewashed By Media Just Like African-Americans

[DreamfulOne]

Barbara Reynolds
TBWT Contributor

In a major tour de force former Bill Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown University on November 7 that even had me agreeing that he really is the closet soul brother author Toni Morrison had labeled him.

Clinton went out on a limb that even some high-visible blacks have not followed in this era of patriotic flag-waving. Among the eyebrow-lifting statements he made in his 45-minute speech to the university's School of Foreign Service:

As a nation, we are still paying for how "this country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or the mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than human."


Here in the United States, "we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were quite frequently killed even though they were thought of as less than fully human."


"In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount.... that story is still being told in the Middle East and we are still paying for it."
Pretty bold wasn't it? Well, most Americans never heard it or read about it because much of the American media either did not cover Clinton's speech, or if they covered it, they failed to include the statements addressing slavery or Native Americans, or distorted it.

CNN covered the speech. On its website, CNN lifted up Clinton's rhetoric about the world being in a "struggle for the soul of the 21st Century," and how there is a great need for a debate with the Muslim world over its values versus the values of the West. Yet there was not a word about what America has learned from its past terrorizing of African-Americans and people of color.

I was amazed to find that a speech of such magnitude given right under the nose of the liberal Washington Post was only given five lines at the bottom of a TV column, but no reporting on the event. The paper's ombudsman, Mike Getler, admitted in print on Nov. 16 that the paper should have covered it, but gave no explanation why it didn't. My phone call and e-mails requesting an explanation were summarily ignored.

The conservative Washington Times was one of the few newspapers in America to cover the speech and they covered it as Clinton was a soul brother like James Brown. The reporter made certain the readers knew Clinton was wearing an orange tie and arrived 45 minutes late. They did quote what Clinton said about people of color, but reminded everyone that while in office Clinton had lied, as if to suggest that he was probably lying now.

Why am I so bothered about this? When the media will censure a former president of the United States apparently because they don't like his history lesson, then we know they cannot be trusted to include African-Americans in their coverage unless we wrap ourselves in the flag and dance to Yankee Doodle Dandy.

All Clinton was saying is what many African-Americans and people of color feel but had no outlet to express. We are no strangers to terror. Slavery, lynching, land-grabs, the KKK have made terrorism against blacks and Hispanics an All-American past time.

In a much kinder and gentler way the Harlem-based ex-president brought to mind what Harlemite Malcolm X had said about "the chickens coming home to roost."

And when the chickens come home to roost they crap on everyone, the just and the unjust. So it seems to me all Americans should be invested in understanding what role our past foreign policy has played in our current dilemma.

In effect that was the message Bill Clinton tried to get across. Too bad the media don't want to hear it.