The Obama Speech
By Paul R. Hollrah
Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan has said such obscenely hateful things about Jews that much of it is difficult to repeat. For example, in a speech at Chicago’s Mosque Maryam in 1995, he said, “German Jews financed Hitler right here in America… and poor Jews died while big Jews were at the root of the Holocaust... Jews (were) playing music, while other Jews (were) marching into the gas chambers...”
Then, in a Saviours' Day speech in Chicago in February 2005, Farrakhan said, “… Jewish people don’t have no hands that are free of the blood of us. They owned slave ships, they bought and sold us. They raped and robbed us…”
When Farrakhan traveled to North Africa to meet with Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi in 1984, his traveling companion was the Rev. Jeremiah A Wright, Jr., senior pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and spiritual advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Later, in 2007, following Obama’s entry into the Democratic presidential primaries, Pastor Wright recalled the trip to Libya. He said, “When (Obama’s) enemies find out that, in 1984, I went to Tripoli to visit Colonel Qaddafi with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”
That same year, Trumpet Magazine (published and edited by Wright’s daughter) presented the 2007 Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to Farrakhan, saying he “truly epitomized greatness.” The magazine quoted Pastor Wright as saying that #Farrakhan was “one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience.”
Reverend Wright is no Martin Luther King, Jr.. In one Christmas sermon, Wright compared Obama’s upbringing to Christ’s life under the Romans. He said, “Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and in a culture that was controlled by rich white people... Barack doesn’t fit the mold… folks are hating on Barack Obama [because] he ain’t white, he ain’t rich, and he ain’t privileged. Barack knows what it’s like living in a country controlled by rich white people…
“Hillary fits the mold… Hillary ain’t never been called a n_ _ _ _ _... Hillary ain’t never had to work twice as hard to get accepted by the rich white folk who run everything, or to get a passing grade… Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No, he ain't!!! Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty.”
Obama has been quoted as saying that, rather than advising him on strategy, Rev. Wright helps keep his priorities straight and his moral compass directed. He said, “What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.”
In a September 2001 sermon, Wright said, “The government gives (black people) the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no! God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.”
On Sunday Sept. 16, 2001, Wright told his congregation that the United States had earned the al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism. He said, “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost,”
We’ve all heard the outrageous slanders that have emanated from the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ… from the mouth of Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright… during the nearly twenty years that Barack Obama has been a member of that congregation. These are but a small sample.
Now, after days and days of Rev. Wright’s poisonous invective on radio and TV, Obama must try to convince the American people that he is fit to be President of the United States and Commander in Chief of our military forces. In a televised address from Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, March 18, Obama refused to distance himself from Rev. Wright. Instead, he insisted that he could no more disown Rev. Wright than he could disown his white grandmother or the black community.
The speech was typical Obama… well conceived and expertly delivered, with something in it for everyone. But it fell far short of ending his downhill slide. Yes, there will be those who insist that he has gotten past the crisis, that he has successfully maintained his friendship with Rev. Wright while disavowing his racist and anti-American outbursts… that he has given us the necessary assurances that his heart is in the right place and that he can be trusted to do what is best for all Americans. But he leaves us with two very large questions.
First, Obama presents himself as a transformational figure of historic proportions, a man who can bridge the gap between the races and who can heal America’s long-festering racial wounds. If that is true, then how could he sit in the pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ for nearly twenty years, listening to the most vitriolic racial and anti-American diatribes, and make no progress whatsoever in healing the heart of a single man: the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright?
And finally, we must never forget that each night, when Obama retires, he shares his bed with a woman who feels every bit as bitter toward her country and its white citizens as Rev. Wright.
About her collegiate life, Michelle Obama has written, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before… I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.” She said, “Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
More recently, in a February campaign speech in Madison, Wisconsin, she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country… not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.”
Obama may be able to physically distance himself from the evil influence of Rev. Wright by living and working in Washington, DC, but how can he insulate himself from the equally corrosive influence of the woman who shares his bed, the mother of his children?
