OBAMA AND RACIST RHETORIC

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It seems that others are beginning to ask the question “Just what did Barack Hussein Obama know about the racist, divisive rhetoric and views of his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?”

Sister Toldjah asked it the other day. We blogged about it here. Now ABC’s Jake Tapper is asking the same question.

In his Friday night cable mea culpas on the incendiary comments made by his spiritual adviser Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., repeatedly said, “I wasn’t in church during the time that these statement were made. I did not hear such incendiary language myself, personally. Either in conversations with him or when I was in the pew, he always preached the social gospel. … If I had heard them repeated, I would have quit. … If I thought that was the repeated tenor of the church, then I wouldn’t feel comfortable there.”

Obama told CNN that he “didn’t know about all these statements. I knew about one or two of these statements that had been made. One or two statements would not lead me to distance myself from either my church or my pastor. … If I had thought that was the tenor or tone on an ongoing basis, then yes, I don’t think it would have been reflective of my values.”

But according to a New York Times story from a year ago, the Obama campaign dis-invited Wright from delivering a public invocation at Obama’s candidacy announcement.

“Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack,” Wright told the Times. “One of his members had talked him into uninviting me.”

Read the rest of it. Looks like the Chocolate Jesus got caught using what Sister Toldjah referred to as Algore’s “iced tea” defense or Bill Clinton claiming he didn’t inhale.

Fact is, Osama bin … Osama Obama … Obamamama has been friends with Wright for 20 years and has been a member of Wright’s radical Afrocentric church for that long. There’s absolutely no way Obama did not know of these views. it’s evident by the views expressed recently by Michelle Obama when she said it’s the first time in her adult life she’s been proud of her country. That’s the type of divisive, hateful rhetoric expressed by Wright on a regular basis from his pulpit of hate at the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Tapper cites an article from Rolling Stone magazine entitled “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama” which contains this passage:

The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city’s far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like. There’s the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite 10 essential facts about the United States. ‘Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college,’ he intones. ‘Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!’ There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. ‘We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. … We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. … We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. … We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!” The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: ‘And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS S***!’”

By the way, Tapper also noted that at some point the title of the article was changed from “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama” to “Destiny’s Child.” As Arte Johnson might have said as the old German soldier on Laugh-In: “Very interesting, ja?”

What’s making people pay attention to what Obama says and what Obama’s minister says is the attempts by the Chocolate Jesus to criticize the injection of race into the campaign.

PLAINFIELD, Ind. (al-AP) - Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday decried “the forces of division” over race that he said are intruding into the Democratic presidential nomination contest. “We have to come together,” he told a town-hall meeting at a high school.

He cited videos of inflammatory sermons given by his pastor that are now being used as political ammunition against him—remarks that Obama has denounced.

“If all I knew were those statements I saw on television, I would be shocked,” Obama said.

Granted, the Clintons have done their share of race-baiting, but can anyone say with a straight face that Obama hasn’t, especially with the incendiary rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright, racist, bigot, anti-Semite and hatemonger extraordinaire?

Obama took steps to distance himself from Wright after ABC News posted the video of Wright’s remarks, but only over Wright’s comments that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks. Obama has never repudiated the black racism espoused by Wright, which has to make any thinking observer wonder if deep down he concurs with Wright’s views. We know from her remarks that Michelle Obama does. She’s clearly been influenced by Wright and she is the one who brought Obama to Wright’s church.

Ron Fournier of al-Associated Press writes an insightful opinion piece of how Obama is walking a fine line between confidence and arrogance and a sense of entitlement.

And Rich Lowry at National Review reminds us that Obama once wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope, the title being borrowed from a sermon given by Jeremiah Wright. Here’s a passage Lowry cites from Obama’s book:

The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.” He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel—the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.

“The painting depicts a harpist,” Reverend Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill…

If Obama claims he’s never heard statements like that from Wright, then how can he include them in his book? And fail to condemn them? He seemed to write it matter-of-factly, almost tacitly approving of the hate-filled, racist, divisive rhetoric.

And Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff writes:

Obama’s own writing suggests that his relationship with the Trinity Church and with Jeremiah Wright has been a deep one. He says he attended church regularly, except during specific periods such as after his first child was born. He says Rev. Wright had a significant influence on him and, in fact, played a major role in bringing him to Jesus.

If we take Obama at his word, his relationship with Wright was not pure opportunism. Rather there was an affinity. What was the nature of that affinity?

I think we should stipulate that it was not Wright’s most extreme racist and anti-American pronouncements. But it also seems clear that it was not traditional Christian belief either. Obama was not looking for that — indeed, he had rejected traditional Christianity before encountering Wright. As just noted, Wright brought him to Jesus. More precisely, Wright’s brand of Christianity accomplished this.

What is that brand? According to Wright (for example, during his contentious interview with Sean Hannity last year), the brand is liberation theology. Liberation theology sees the Christian mission as bringing justice to oppressed people through political activism. In effect, it is a merger of Christianity with radical left-wing ideology. Black liberation theology, as articulated for example by James Cone who inspired Wright, emphasizes the racial aspect oppression.

It’s easy to see why this brand of Christianity, and probably only this brand, could bring a left-wing political activist like Obama to Jesus.

Ron Kessler and Jim Davis of Newsmax claim that Obama was in church on July 22, 2007 to hear a hateful, divisive, racist sermon laced with profanities delivered by Wright. The Obama campaing has fired back by claiming the Senator was in Miami to give a speech — ironically to the racial separatists and racial supremacists at La Raza, the Hispanic version of the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan — and appears to have video evidence of Obama appearing in Miami, but the church has services at 7:30 a.m., 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., thus allowing sufficient time for Obama to have been in church and still given his speech in the early afternoon. Davis stands by his eyewitness account of seeing Obama as well as Secret Service agents at the service.

From Kessler’s report:

If Obama’s claims are true that he was completely unaware that Wright’s trademark preaching style at the Trinity United Church of Christ has targeted “white” America and Israel, he would have been one of the few people in Chicago to be so uninformed. Wright’s reputation for spewing hate is well known.

In fact, Obama was present in the South Side Chicago church on July 22 last year when Jim Davis, a freelance correspondent for Newsmax, attended services along with Obama.

In his sermon that day, Wright tore into America, referring to the “United States of White America” and lacing his sermon with expletives as Obama listened. Hearing Wright’s attacks on his own country, Obama had the opportunity to walk out, but Davis said the senator sat in his pew and nodded in agreement.

Addressing the Iraq war, Wright thundered, “Young African-American men” were “dying for nothing.” The “illegal war,” he shouted, was “based on Bush’s lies” and is being “fought for oil money.”

Kessler goes on to point out that one of the church’s former parishioner was Oprah Winfrey, Obama’s most prominent celebrity backer. Winfrey left the church abruptly in order to distance herself from Wright’s racist, hateful rhetoric and wound up a target of the preacher’s excoriation.

Davis’s original report was dated August 2007. You can read it here.

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Filed under 2008 Election, Barack Hussein Obama, Racism