[Vision2020] Politics and Religion and Big Windbag

[Sunil Ramalingam]

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Sunil

> Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 16:26:31 -0700
> From: no.weatherman at gmail.com
> To: vision2020 at moscow.com
> Subject: [Vision2020] Politics and Religion
> 
> Visionaries,
> 
> I am afraid that I got off on the wrong foot with some of you. They
> say that if you want to keep your friends, you shouldn't talk politics
> and religion with them and I made the mistake of broaching a highly
> incendiary — indeed, explosive — political discussion with you when I
> forced Barrack Hussein Obama's long-standing close personal
> relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers to the forefront of
> this conversation. This was wrong of me. If Obama does not have to
> account for his friendship with a man who declared war on the US and
> has not rescinded his declaration, why should any of his supporters
> have to account for it? It's good enough that we pretend it never
> happened and no conflicts exist. After all, what we don't know can't
> hurt us.
> 
> Therefore, I wish to try again. Instead of politics, let's talk
> religion — Obama's religion — as Rev. Wright's church's magazine,
> Trumpet, reveals it.
> 
> Question: What do Barrack Hussein Obama and Louis Farrakhan have in common?
> Answer: They both made the cover of Trumpet, except Obama didn't know
> that Wright is a radical.
> 
> Jeremiah Wright's 'Trumpet'
> The content of the magazine produced by Barack Obama's pastor reveals
> the content of his character.
> by Stanley Kurtz
> 
> http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/082ktdyi.asp
> 
> To the question of the moment — What did Barack Obama know and when
> did he know it? — I answer, Obama knew everything, and he's known it
> for ages. Far from succumbing to surprise and shock after Jeremiah
> Wright's disastrous performance at the National Press Club, Barack
> Obama must have long been aware of his pastor's political radicalism.
> A careful reading of nearly a year's worth of Trumpet Newsmagazine,
> Wright's glossy national "lifestyle magazine for the socially
> conscious," makes it next to impossible to conclude otherwise.
> 
> Wright founded Trumpet Newsmagazine in 1982 as a "church newspaper" —
> primarily for his own congregation, one gathers — to "preach a message
> of social justice to those who might not hear it in worship service."
> So Obama's presence at sermons is not the only measure of his
> knowledge of Wright's views. Glance through even a single issue of
> Trumpet, and Wright's radical politics are everywhere — in the
> pictures, the headlines, the highlighted quotations, and above all in
> the articles themselves. It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years,
> Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet. In fact, Obama
> himself graced the cover at least once (although efforts to obtain
> that issue from the publisher or Obama's interview with the magazine
> from his campaign were unsuccessful).
> 
> Building on his reputation as a charismatic and "socially conscious"
> preacher (and no doubt also upon the fame conferred by his Obama
> connection), Wright decided several years ago to take the publication
> national. In September 2005, Trumpet officially separated from
> Wright's church and became an independent entity, with Wright as CEO
> and his two eldest daughters managing the magazine. Then in March
> 2006, with key financial backing from the TV One network, Trumpet
> released its first nationally distributed issue. The goal was to turn
> Trumpet into "a more sophisticated publication that would speak not
> just to black Christians but to the entire African-American
> community." In November 2005, Wright's daughter and Trumpet
> publisher/editor in chief Jeri Wright announced the goal of increasing
> circulation from 5,000 to 100,000 in 10 months. Thanks to a national
> publicity blitz, she was able to declare that goal had been met well
> ahead of schedule.
> 
> If you've heard about the "Empowerment Award" bestowed upon Louis
> Farrakhan by Wright, or about Wright's derogation of "garlic-nosed"
> Italians (of the ancient Roman variety), then you already know
> something about Trumpet. Farrakhan's picture was on the cover of a
> special November/December 2007 double issue, along with an
> announcement of the Empowerment Award and Wright's praise of Farrakhan
> as a 20th- and 21st-century "giant." Wright's words about Farrakhan
> were almost identical to those that, just four months later, led a
> supposedly shocked Obama to repudiate Wright. The insult to Italians
> was in the same double issue.
> 
> I obtained the 2006 run of Trumpet, from the first nationally
> distributed issue in March to the November/December double issue. To
> read it is to come away impressed by Wright's thoroughgoing political
> radicalism. There are plenty of arresting sound bites, of course, but
> the larger context is more illuminating — and more disturbing — than
> any single shock-quotation. Trumpet provides a rounded picture of
> Wright's views, and what it shows unmistakably is that the
> now-infamous YouTube snippets from Wright's sermons are authentic
> reflections of his core political and theological beliefs. It leaves
> no doubt that his religion is political, his attitude toward America
> is bitterly hostile, and he has fundamental problems with capitalism,
> white people, and "assimilationist" blacks. Even some of Wright's
> famed "good works," and his moving "Audacity to Hope" sermon, are
> placed in a disturbing new light by a reading of Trumpet.
> 
> Getting across his political message is Wright's highest priority.
> Back in May 2007, the liberal, Chicago-based Christian Century
> published an extended study — really a defense — of Wright's church.
> Attempting to inoculate Wright (and Obama) from critics like Sean
> Hannity and Tucker Carlson, Christian Century dismissed the notion
> that Wright's Trinity church "is a political organization constantly
> advocating for social change." Yet in Trumpet, Wright and his fellow
> columnists show themselves to be exactly that.
> 
> Wright is the foremost acolyte of James Cone's "black liberation
> theology," which puts politics at the center of religion. Wright
> himself is explicit:
> 
> "[T]here was no separation Biblically and historically and there is no
> separation contemporaneously between 'religion and politics.' . . .
> The Word of God has everything to do with racism, sexism, militarism,
> social justice and the world in which we live daily."
> 
> In fact, for all his rousing rhetoric, Wright is a bit of a policy
> wonk, moving fluidly and frequently from excoriations of American
> foreign policy in various African countries, to denunciations of
> Senate votes on the minimum wage, to fulminations against FCC
> licensing policies and Clear Channel, and so much more. Wright is up
> to speed on local, national, and international politics, and it's
> tough to imagine him missing an opportunity to confer with Obama on
> his wide array of legislative crusades.
> 
> When Trumpet surprised Wright with a "Lifetime Achievement Trumpeter
> Award," it said that he "preaches a liberation theology" whose
> "religious message [is] fused with political activism." Not only does
> black liberation theology founder James Cone see Wright as his most
> important follower, but Wright's successor as pastor at Trinity, Otis
> Moss III, also views Wright as the quintessential political pastor.
> Moss (himself now considered the most promising young
> black-liberationist preacher in the country) turned down the
> opportunity to step into the leadership of his own preacher-father's
> nationally known church for a chance to serve at the still more
> renowned Trinity. Wright's Trinity, affirms Moss, is "the most
> socially conscious African-centered and politically active church in
> the nation."
> 
> While the majority of Trumpet's articles weave radical politics into a
> religious framework, some are purely political. For example, the April
> 2006 issue features a column entitled "Demand Impeachment Now!" The
> author pointedly refuses to call Bush "president," merely referring to
> him as the "resident" of the White House (and therefore as "Resident
> Bush"). Another piece taunts Vice President Cheney for his shooting
> accident and ends, "America, it's time for regime change." Neither
> piece has so much as a religious veneer.
> 
> What about patriotism? While many consider Wright's call for God to
> damn America irredeemable, others might argue that "in context,"
> Wright's prophetic denunciations actually prove his love of country.
> Unfortunately, neither Wright nor any of the other regular Trumpet
> columnists displays a trace of this "I'm denouncing you because I love
> you" stance. On the contrary, the pages of Trumpet resonate with
> enraged criticism of the United States. Indeed, they feature explicit
> repudiations of even the most basic expressions of American
> patriotism, supporting instead an "African-centered" perspective that
> treats black Americans as virtual strangers in a foreign land.
> 
> Although the expression "African American" appears in Trumpet, the
> magazine more typically refers to American blacks as "Africans living
> in the Western Diaspora." Wright and the other columnists at Trumpet
> seem to think of blacks as in, but not of, America. The deeper
> connection is to Africans on the continent, and to the worldwide
> diaspora of African-originated peoples. In an image that captures the
> spirit of Wright's relationship to the United States, he speaks of
> blacks as "songbirds" locked in "this cage called America."
> 
> Wright views the United States as a criminal nation. Here is a typical
> passage: "Do you see God as a God who approves of Americans taking
> other people's countries? Taking other people's women? Raping teenage
> girls and calling it love (as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally
> Hemmings)?" Anyone who does think this way, Wright suggests, should
> revise his notion of God. Implicitly drawing on Marxist "dependency
> theory," Wright blames Africa's troubles on capitalist exploitation by
> the West, and also on inadequate American aid: "Some analysts would go
> so far as to even call what [the United States, the G-8, and
> multinational corporations] are doing [in Africa] genocide!"
> 
> According to Wright, America's alleged genocide in Africa, as well as
> its treatment of "Africans in the Western diaspora," both leads to and
> flows from a single underlying truth: "White supremacy is the bed rock
> of the philosophical, ideological and theological foundations of this
> country." So for Wright, it's really not a question of correcting
> America in the spirit of a loving patriot. America, to Wright, is a
> kind of alien formation, scarcely less of a "cage" for "Africans in
> the Western Diaspora" than it was during the days of slavery: "[T]his
> country is built off, and continues to exist on, the premise of white
> supremacy." Again and again, Wright makes the point that America's
> criminality and racism are not aberrations but of the essence of the
> nation, that they are every bit as alive today as during the slave
> era, and that America is therefore no better than the worst
> international offenders: "White supremacy undergirds the thought, the
> ideology, the theology, the sociology, the legal structure, the
> educational system, the healthcare system, and the entire reality of
> the United States of America and South Africa!" (Emphasis Wright's.)
> 
> One of Wright's most striking images of American evil invokes
> Hurricane Katrina. Here are excerpts of a piece in the May 2006
> Trumpet:
> 
> "We need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy.
> 
> "We need to educate our children about the white supremacist's
> foundations of the educational system.
> 
> "When the levees in Louisiana broke alligators, crocodiles and piranha
> swam freely through what used to be the streets of New Orleans. That
> is an analogy that we need to drum into the heads of our African
> American children (and indeed all children!).
> 
> "In the flood waters of white supremacy . . . there are also
> crocodiles, alligators and piranha!
> 
> "The policies with which we live now and against which our children
> will have to struggle in order to bring about 'the beloved community,'
> are policies shaped by predators.
> 
> "We lay a foundation, deconstructing the household of white supremacy
> with tools that are not the master's tools. We lay the foundation with
> hope. We deconstruct the vicious and demonic ideology of white
> supremacy with hope. Our hope is not built on faith-based dollars,
> empty liberal promises or veiled hate-filled preachments of the
> so-called conservatives. Our hope is built on Him who came in the
> flesh to set us free."
> 
> Given Wright's conviction that America, past and present, is
> criminally white supremacist — even genocidal — to its core, Wright is
> not a fan of patriotic celebration. Predictably, Columbus Day is a day
> of rage for Wright. Calling Columbus a racist slave trader, Wright
> excoriates the holiday as "a national act of amnesia and denial," part
> of the "sick and myopic arrogance called Western History."
> 
> Strangely, given his view of this country, Wright insists that real
> credit for America's discovery goes to Africans. As evidence for the
> African discovery of America, Wright cites Dr. Ivan van Sertima's book
> They Came Before Columbus. (Sertima's work has been severely
> criticized by scholars and was dismissed by prominent British
> archaeologist Glyn Daniel in a 1977 New York Times book review as
> "ignorant rubbish.") Wright concludes: "Giving Columbus the credit is
> called 'American History' or 'The History of Western Civilization.'
> Back in the 1960's we called it what it was and is, however, and that
> is 'a pack of lies.'"
> 
> Contempt for Columbus Day is hardly novel, but in the 2006 July/August
> issue, regular Trumpet columnist the Rev. Reginald Williams Jr. comes
> down hard on the Fourth of July, which Williams dismisses as "the
> national holiday of the dominant culture." Williams invokes Frederick
> Douglass's famous 1852 Fourth of July address:
> 
> "What to the slave is the 4th of July? What have I to do with your
> national independence?. . . What to the American slave is your 4th of
> July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in
> the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant
> victim. To him, your celebration is a sham . . . your national
> greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and
> heartless . . . your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings
> . . . mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin
> veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."
> 
> To Williams, Douglass's words ring every bit as true today as they did
> before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. (This column is
> illustrated with a large picture of slave manacles.) Williams goes on
> to echo and update Douglass, condemning the Fourth as "nothing more
> than a day off work and a time for some good barbeque to the millions
> of African Americans who suffer and have suffered under the policies
> of this government and this country." Liberation theologian that he
> is, Williams is particularly hostile to those who "will even invoke
> religious fervor, and biblical quotes to justify their flawed sense of
> phony patriotism." No flag pins here.
> 
> Hostility to capitalism is another of Trumpet's pervasive themes. As
> we've seen, Wright blames multinational corporations for conflict and
> poverty in Africa. Trinity Church urges parishioners to boycott
> Wal-Mart, and Wright decries what he calls "the "Wal-martization of
> the world." In another one of his regular Trumpet columns, Reginald
> Williams criticizes McDonald's for failing to heed leftist advocacy
> groups by voluntarily raising the price it pays for tomatoes (so as to
> raise the wages of tomato pickers). Williams apparently wants to
> replace market mechanisms with a pricing system dictated by "human
> rights groups."
> 
> While the nationally distributed issues of Trumpet in 2006 contained
> no pieces blaming 9/11 on America's "terrorist" foreign policy (as
> Wright did in a famous sermon), one remarkable piece defended
> then-congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's suspicion that the Bush
> administration knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened. This
> column, "The Beloved Cynthia McKinney" (illustrated with pictures of
> McKinney in model-like poses), decries the fact that McKinney was
> "tarred and feathered in the press" for raising questions about
> possible government foreknowledge of 9/11. The "crimes of 9/11," it
> darkly announces, are "not only unsolved, but covered up by both
> Democrats and Republicans."
> 
> America's justice system is another favorite Trumpet theme. Wright
> likes to call it "the criminal injustice system." A piece headed "Read
> Me My Rights: Protocol for Dealing with the Police" decries racial
> profiling and counsels those detained to refuse to speak to police
> without a lawyer present. Reginald Williams calls prisons "the new
> concrete plantations" and likens the inclusion of nonvoting prisoners
> in state population counts to the official counting of nonvoting
> slaves in state populations before the Civil War. In other words, the
> abolition of slavery and segregation notwithstanding, America is still
> a fundamentally racist nation. Wright likes to call the American North
> "up South."
> 
> Is Wright an anti-white racist? He would certainly deny it. In When
> Black Men Stand Up for God (a book he coauthored, in praise of Louis
> Farrakhan's Million Man March), Wright says, "The enemy is not white
> people. The enemy is white supremacy." There are white members of
> Wright's church, and black liberation theologians have always, if a
> bit reluctantly, welcomed support from white radicals. Nonetheless,
> the problem of reverse racism keeps coming up, abetted by episodes
> like the assault on "garlic-nosed" Italians.
> 
> Wright's swipe at Italians is actually directed toward the Romans who
> crucified Jesus (in what James Cone calls a "first-century lynching").
> Following black liberation theology, Wright emphasizes that the black
> Jesus was "murdered by the European oppressors who looked down on His
> people." In a sense, then, disclaimers notwithstanding, Wright turns
> the crucifixion into a potential charter for "anti-European" anger.
> 
> Wright, however, rejects the notion that "black racism" is even
> possible. That is why he prefers the term "white supremacy" to
> "racism." "Racism," says Wright, is a "slippery" and "nebulous" term,
> precisely because it seems potentially applicable to blacks and whites
> alike. The term "white supremacy" solves this problem, and Wright
> deploys it at every opportunity.
> 
> Wright opposes "assimilation," expressing displeasure with the likes
> of Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Colin Powell. He dismisses
> such blacks as "sell outs." Wright's hostility to assimilation goes
> beyond classic American expressions of pride in ethnic or religious
> heritage. For example, Wright claims that "desegregation is not the
> same as integration. . . . Desegregation did not mean that white
> children would now come to Black schools and learn our story, our
> history, our heritage, our legacy, our beauty and our strength!" This,
> for Wright, is genuine "integration."
> 
> One of the most striking features of Wright's Trumpet columns is the
> light they shed on his longstanding theme of "hope." Wright's
> "Audacity to Hope" sermon is built around a painting he describes of a
> torn and tattered woman sitting atop a globe and playing a harp that
> has lost all but a single string. In that sermon, Wright's allegory of
> hope amidst despair concentrates on our need to soldier on in faith
> amidst personal tragedy. Yet the "Audacity" sermon also features
> allusions to South Africa's Sharpeville Massacre (1960) and "white
> folks's greed [that] runs a world in need."
> 
> In Trumpet, the political context of the "hope" theme is harsher
> still. Instead of counseling determination amidst personal tragedy,
> Wright uses "hope" to exhort his readers to boldly carry on the
> long-odds struggle against white supremacist America: "We deconstruct
> the vicious and demonic ideology of white supremacy with hope." Here's
> another passage in the same mode:
> 
> "[O]ur fight against Wal-Mart's practices has not been won and might
> never be won in our lifetime. That does not mean we stop struggling
> against what it is they stand for that is not in keeping with God's
> will and God's Kingdom that we pray will come every day."
> 
> In that earlier striking passage on the post-Katrina flooding in New
> Orleans, Wright speaks of his determination to "drum into the heads of
> our African American children (and indeed, all children!)" the idea
> that America is flooded with the "crocodiles, alligators and piranha"
> of white supremacy. That image creates the context for one of Wright's
> most energetic invocations of "hope":
> 
> "We are on the verge of launching our African-centered Christian
> school. The dream of that school, which we articulated in 1979, was
> built on hope. That hope still lives. That school has to have at its
> core an understanding and assessment of white supremacy as we
> deconstruct that reality to help our children become all that God
> created them to be when God made them in God's own image."
> 
> The construction of a school for inner city children undoubtedly falls
> into the category of the "good works" which nearly everyone recognizes
> as a benefit bestowed by Trinity Church on the surrounding community,
> Wright's ideology notwithstanding. But is a school that portrays
> America as a white supremacist nation filled with predatory alligators
> and piranha a good work?
> 
> Wright's status as a father-figure comes through clearly in the pages
> of Trumpet. In a Trumpet interview, Jesse Jackson characterizes Wright
> as "between a huge father, pastor, preacher, [and] prophet." Wright's
> young minister protégés call him "Daddy J" and "Uncle J," and perhaps
> this latter name prompted Obama's reference to Wright as "like an
> uncle." Obama's longing for a father figure surely gave him a great
> hunger to get to know what Wright was about. In their first meeting,
> Wright warned Obama that many considered him too politically radical,
> and it is simply inconceivable that in 20 years' time someone as sharp
> as Obama did not grasp the intensely political themes repeated in so
> much of what Wright says and does. Radical politics is no sideline for
> Wright, but the very core of his theology and practice.
> 
> There can be no mistaking it. What did Barack Obama know and when did
> he know it? Everything. Always.
> 
> Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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