SIRTE, Libya – Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Tuesday called Barack Obama a “flicker of hope in the middle of the imperialist darkness”, but said he feared the president could be assassinated.

Gaddafi, known for his controversial statements, did not say who might want to kill Obama but gave the examples of the assassinations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, as well as black rights leader Martin Luther King.

“I fear that they could liquidate this young man or force him to submit to their imperialist policies,” Gaddafi told a university gathering of his supporters in Sirte, without specifying who might put Obama under pressure.

“Obama is a flicker of hope in the middle of the imperialist darkness,” the Libyan leader said, adding: “There is a fear that they would liquidate him as they liquidated Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln.”

Gaddafi, who is the African Union chairman, had offered to work with Obama to sustain security, stability and prosperity in Africa and elsewhere.

Gaddafi praised Obama for breaking with what he said was the previous American foreign policy that dictated to the rest of the world what to do to serve U.S. interests.

“He (Obama) speaks logically. Arrogance no longer exists in the American approach which was previously based on dictating to the rest of the world in order to meet its own conditions,” Gaddafi said in the remarks carried by state media.

Gaddafi, who took power in 1969 in a military coup in his oil- and gas-rich North African state, was shunned for decades by the West, which accused him of supporting terrorism.

His ties with Western countries have improved since Libya announced in 2003 it was scrapping weapons of mass destruction programs and agreed to pay compensation for families of victims of bombings of U.S. and French airliners.

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By Kap Kirwok

Sometime in June, the ever controversial Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said the then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had an ‘inferiority complex‘ because he is black and if elected might ‘behave worse than whites‘.

Now that Obama will be President, it is time to examine this ‘inferiority‘ accusation more closely.

   By Newbreen.com

When a black person projects confidence, he is accused of putting on airs; he is overconfident, too cocky; or they will simply say he is imitating the white man — ‘acting white‘, as they say in the US.

When a black person projects humility, it is said he is acting true to character — subservient, inferior, slavish and lacking in confidence. In short, he is accused of suffering from an inferiority complex.

Will the ascension of a black man to the most powerful office on earth restore some respectability to the black man’s battered image?

I doubt it. The black man has a millennium old image problem. Racial prejudice against black people runs deep, with antecedents that span centuries. The historical and psychological roots of racial prejudice against blacks are many and complex, but you could reduce them to four words: military conquest and enslavement. Throughout history, any people that have been conquered and ruled or enslaved are always treated by the conquerors as inferior.

It is why the British imperialist poet, Rudyard Kipling, in his poem, The White Man’s Burden, uses words such as ‘half-devil and half-child‘ to refer to the conquered people of the Philippine Islands, while exhorting the white empire to act as the almighty lord to all ‘inferior’ races.

Prejudice

While blatant displays of prejudice against black people are less overt today compared to Kipling’s time, they are no less frequent and virulent in their subterranean form. In a recent article in the New York Times, columnist Nicholas D Kristof reports on studies by several scholars, which showed rampant unconscious bias and racism towards black people.

Prejudice against black people is so deeply ingrained and embedded in the psyche that racially discriminatory and prejudicial behaviour often operates subliminally. It is sad and tragic. But the greater tragedy is this: even black people themselves are caught up in unconscious discrimination towards people of their own race.

There is a popular and free test on the Internet that you can take to test the level of your unconscious bias. It is called the Implicit Association Test and is run by a team of psychologists led by Prof Tony Greenwald of the University of Washington.

Choosing the whites

The test is designed to probe unconscious biases in people. It is one thing to lie about one’s true thoughts and feelings; it is entirely another to not even know what is truly in your mind. For example, well-meaning people who say they have no racial prejudices might be surprised to discover they are in fact unconsciously racist.

When such people are faced with a decision that requires making a choice between a black and a white with similar qualifications and experience — such as in a job interview setting — they will always choose the white person.

If you think you know your mind well, you might want to withhold that judgment until you have taken the Implicit Association Test. It has the potential to shock you.

The implication of all these is the black man’s burden is double in weight. On top of the weight of conscious and unconscious white racial prejudice, there is the extra baggage of conscious and unconscious black inferiority complex.

It raises a disturbing question. Will the black race ever rid itself of this double load? Conquering and enslaving another race is out of the question, at least not in this millennium. Becoming the president of the most powerful country on earth will not do it either. For every good an Obama-type does to the black man’s image, there are a million negative images competing to nullify the effect.

Inferiority complex

There is one way to do it and it is not by decolonising the mind through the promotion of native languages, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o suggests in his book Decolonising The Mind. It is not by merely urging Africans to ‘drop the inferiority complex’, as Gambian President Yahya Jammeh recently said.

It is only through a combination of strategic humility and strategic pursuit of self-interest in a determined effort to raise black people’s development — individually and collectively — that our millennium-old image problem will be addressed. It means recognising that we are in a hole (literally and perceptually) and then using any means necessary to climb out.

Writes: David Ochami

President Kibaki has made new friends in a quiet shift of ideology — a move causing disquiet among Kenya’s traditional Western allies, The Standard can reveal.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his newfound friends, (clockwise) Chinese President Hu jintao, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

The exposure of a series of deals discreetly cut between Nairobi and Tripoli illustrates how close Kibaki has become to Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

State House also started courting China, Iran and Eastern European backers following strained relations with Western allies appalled by spiraling corruption and bad governance.

Under Kibaki, China and Iran’s diplomatic and economic influence have risen, converse to falling relations with the West.

But it is Gaddafi, whose latest ‘incursions’ into Kenya has touched off alarm bells. Tripoli’s activities have created the worrying impression of a ‘takeover.’

Kenya’s traditional western allies are jittery over the ideological shift….[MORE >>]

REFERENCES:

1. Uproar over Kenya hotel sale to Libya
2. Kenya government gifts major hotel to Libya for peanuts
3. 20 reasons why President Kibaki’s Government should be overthrown by Kenyans
4. Hotel saga reveals Kenya cracks