During her Saturday program, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry defended President Obama’s recent speech on terrorism and compared the experience of American prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to that of slaves.
“The far more intense argument is, I think, and certainly what the president was trying to address, in that he was indicating to us there’s a thing that make us Americans that persists throughout the world,” Harris-Perry said. “Sometimes we do the wrong things. Sometimes we make the choice that we did in Hiroshima or in Nagasaki. But then we have to make a choice as a country to say that use of force was incorrect. We were making the wrong choices when we interned people, and so now we are now going to pull back. And this is the moment where we have to reaffirm our American-ness.”
“I also appreciate that the hunger strikers are not trying to die,” she continued. “They’re trying to generate autonomy in the context of something that strips their humanity — something we certainly know about from the experience of American slavery, and that the language of ‘before I be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free’ — just that idea of creating human freedom within the context of horrible human conditions.”
(h/t Breitbart TV)