To say that New York City Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn)
is a disgrace to the institution in which he serves would be
incorrect; after last week, the City Council can no longer be
disgraced.
Barron is a former Black Panther. He was elected from the
predominantly black 42nd District in Brooklyn, swept into office on
a straightforward let’s-stick-it-to-whitey vote, and he spent his
first day on the job petitioning to remove a painting of Thomas
Jefferson from City Hall and replace it with one of Malcolm X.
“We’re bringing the ‘hood to the hall,” Barron declared.
That performance was followed by his little pep talk at the
Reparations March in Washington, D.C. last summer. Barron told the
cheering crowd, “I want to go up to the closest white person and
say ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap
him, just for my mental health.”
Barron’s most recent bit of badder-than-thou minstrelsy came
during last week’s ludicrous debate over the council’s resolution
opposing war with Iraq. (Why a city council needs a foreign policy
is unclear.) The resolution passed 31-17, so the city that
witnessed the terrorist murder of 3,000 souls is now on record in
its opposition to the next step of the war on terrorism.
Even amidst those shameful proceedings, Barron managed to lower
the rhetorical bar and then limbo underneath it. First he stated,
“This threat of war is about oil, and we’re not spilling our blood
for oil.” The suggestion that Bush’s Iraqi strategy is determined
by oil interests is nonsensical; no one who understands market
economics believes it; even Susan Sontag, an unwavering
Bush-detractor, has called the antiwar movement’s No-Blood-For-Oil
sloganeering “stupid.”
But Barron didn’t end there. Even as he insisted that the war is
really about oil, he also insisted that the war “is about
protecting a single ally” — by which he meant Israel. So the
looming war, according to Barron, is being driven by a conspiracy
of Big Oil … except when it’s being driven by a conspiracy of Big
Jews.
The problem, of course, is that the two conspiracies are
virtually irreconcilable. If our foreign policy is set by oil
companies, why would we ally ourselves with a country sitting on
the single postage stamp of land in the entire Middle East with no
oil reserves? If our foreign policy is set by Jewish interests, why
are we going after the scummy regime in Iraq rather than, say, the
scummy regime in Syria — which poses a more immediate threat to
Israel?
It’s possible, perhaps, to reconcile the two conspiracies by
imagining that the United States is confronting Iraq in order to
conquer the entire Middle East and turn over its oil fields to
Israel. This is just the sort of paranoid delusion that percolates
on the so-called “Arab Street.” The fact that a New York City
Councilman cannot see through it calls into question not only his
own sanity but also the collective sanity of the district that
voted him into office.
