Word: mandelas
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...just as Mandela is seeking something from Americans, Americans are seeking something from him. Politicians hurry to pose with him, community leaders draw inspiration -- and status -- from his proximity, longtime antiapartheid activists take satisfaction from the mere sight of him. For a sometimes dispirited American civil rights coalition, Mandela provides, as he has before, a rallying point and common cause. For the many blacks who have begun to call themselves African Americans, he is a flesh-and-blood exemplar of what an African can be. For Americans of all colors, weary of their nation's perennial racial standoffs, his visit...
...Mandela can serve all those purposes, it is partly because for so long he remained an unknown quantity. Emerging from the enforced silence of a prison cell, he arrived in the U.S. more as a symbol of courage and hope than as a politician with well-known positions. Even when his positions were unequivocally stated, they were sometimes overlooked last week. New York Mayor David Dinkins could hail his guest as "a man of peace," a title that acknowledges Mandela's exemplary lack of bitterness toward his former captors, while sidestepping his refusal to disown violence as a means...
...Mandela heartened Americans by emphasizing that he envisioned a multiracial future for his country, with full respect for the rights of the white minority. He promised potential investors that their ventures would be welcome in a South Africa in which everyone, regardless of race, had the vote. Nonetheless, some of his remarks inevitably drew him into the maelstrom of U.S. politics...
Even before he arrived in New York, there were rumblings among American Jews about Mandela's praise for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He has met with Yasser Arafat three times since his release from prison in February. Much of that concern had been put to rest -- or at least diplomatically laid aside -- after a June 10 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, at which Mandela assured a contingent of American Jewish leaders that he supported Israel's right to exist within secure borders. There was no such comfort for Cuban Americans in Miami, where Mandela is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. They...
...contretemps with Jews threatened to flare anew after a televised "town meeting" presided over by Nightline's Ted Koppel. Mandela had kind words again for Arafat, Castro and even Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. They "support our struggle to the hilt," was his explanation. When asked about the human-rights shortcomings of Libya and Cuba, Mandela retorted that the A.N.C. had "no time to be looking to the internal affairs of other countries...