NOT EXACTLY WHAT SHE SAID

Critics of US policy are racist, says Rice (David Rennie, 09/08/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Miss Rice rarely plays on her upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama - a hotbed of racial strife in the Sixties, culminating in the fatal bombing of a black church. However, addressing the National Association of Black Journalists in Dallas, she used that personal history to issue a direct challenge to all those critical of the Bush administration's ambitions in Iraq and beyond.

"Like many of you, I grew up around the home-grown terrorism of the 1960s. I remember the bombing of the church in Birmingham in 1963, because one of the little girls that died was a friend of mine," she said.

Black Americans should stand by others seeking freedom today, she went on, and shun the "condescending" argument that some races or nations were not interested in or ready for Western freedoms.

"We've heard that argument before. And we, more than any, as a people, should be ready to reject it," she said. "That view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East."

There's inevitably some racial element involved when folks claim that Arabs are "incapable" of self-government or that they do not have the same desire for peace and freedom as we in the West, but the argument that Arab Islamic culture--at least as it obtains now--predisposes people against the kind of liberal democratic states that we in the West know they must move towards is really culturalist rather than racist and it is correct. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 10, 2003 7:06 AM