Thus, when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote last week about the troubling facts about Obama’s membership in a Chicago church whose pastor was a friend and supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the racist and anti-Semitic head of the Nation of Islam, he raised a question that some people didn’t want to hear.
In response to queries about his closeness with Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose Trumpet magazine once lauded Farrakhan as a man who “truly epitomized greatness,” Obama subsequently made it clear that he didn’t agree with his church and strongly condemned Farrakhan. The candidate repeated his disgust with anti-Semitism in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech in King’s own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
That was more than enough for the ADL. And though some might still ask why he belonged to such a church (would any candidate get away with belonging to, say, a country club that practiced or advocated discrimination?), the case seemed closed.
However, what was equally interesting was the response to Cohen, a liberal anchor of the Post’s Op-Ed page, from some on the left.
Novelist Michael Chabon wrote on HuffingtonPost.com that merely raising any questions about Obama and Farrakhan was itself illegitimate, even if the facts of this case were not Internet rumors. For Chabon, simply putting the words Obama and Farrakhan in the same article was “fear-mongering” and using the tactics of “propagandists of hatred.” Chabon seemed to feel that anything written about a black that might alienate him from Jews was part of a racist mindset.
So for all the distance we have traveled toward King’s vision of a colorblind society, it appears that some view any questions about a black as inherently tainted by prejudice. This is the same sort of false sensitivity that turned an otherwise unexceptionable statement from Hillary Clinton about the roles played by King and President Lyndon Johnson in passing civil-rights legislation into a controversy.
But if Obama is to be elected president, he can’t be treated as a racial icon who must be treated with kid gloves and spared the examination to which other contenders must submit.
Jews and anyone else who oppose him simply because his father was a Muslim from Kenya offend the spirit of American democracy. But Jews like Chabon, who insist that not even reasonable questions about his associations should be raised, are just as wrong. There are good reasons for Democrats to like Obama, but there are also serious worries about him.
