Posted on 01/14/2008 5:32:30 PM PST by wagglebee
Barack Obama’s longtime minister, mentor, and sounding board has been a key supporter of Louis Farrakhan and last month honored the Nation of Islam leader for lifetime achievement.
Farrakhan has repeatedly made hate-filled statements targeting Jews, whites, America, and homosexuals. He has called whites “blue-eyed devils” and the “anti-Christ.” He has described Jews as “bloodsuckers” who control the government, the media, and some black organizations.
“Do you know some of these satanic Jews have taken over BET [the Black Entertainment Network]?” Farrakhan said in a speech on Nov. 11, 2007. “Everything that we built, they have. The mind of Satan now is running the record industry, movie industry, and television. And they make us look like we’re the murderers; we look like we’re the gangsters, but we’re punk stuff.”
The month after that speech, Obama’s minister and friend, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and his Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, honored Farrakhan at a gala, bestowing on him its Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer award.
Obama has said he found religion through Wright in the 1980s and consulted him before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Wright before announcing his candidacy last year.
In the November/December issue of his church’s magazine, Trumpet, Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan, whom he helped in organizing the Million Man March in Washington in 1995. Wright lauded Farrakhan as one of the giants of the African-American religious experience in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“When Minister Farrakhan speaks, black America listens,” Wright said. “His depth on analysis [sic] when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye-opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest.”
Hailing Farrakhan’s “integrity and honesty,” Wright said, “His love for Africa and African-American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change, and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.”
A video quoting some of Wright’s opprobriums ran at the gala at the Hyatt Regency Chicago and appears on YouTube. However, while the mainstream media have hammered Mitt Romney over his religion, they have ignored or else downplayed Obama’s ties to Wright. No stories have appeared on Wright’s award to Farrakhan in December.
Wright’s church occupies a brick building at 400 West 95th Street near a public housing project and railroad tracks. Since becoming pastor in 1972, Wright has seen the church’s membership grow from 80 to more than 8,500. The church is the largest congregation in the United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination known for its liberal politics. Obama’s church runs an outreach program to attract gay and lesbian singles.
Born in Hawaii, Obama is the son of a white Christian mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father who was a Muslim but was not religious. From age 6 to 10, Obama lived in Indonesia, where he went to a Catholic school. For a year, he went to a public school where he attended Islamic religion classes.
Obama says he found religion and Jesus Christ through Wright, whom he met in the mid-1980s. Obama has been attending Wright’s church regularly since 1988. Wright warned Obama that getting involved with Trinity, with its radical reputation, might turn off other black clergy. But in 1991, Obama joined the church and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith. Wright later married Obama and Michelle Robinson and baptized their two daughters.
The title of Obama’s bestseller “The Audacity of Hope” comes from one of Wright’s sermons. Wright is one of the first people Obama thanked after his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.
For a Jan. 21, 2007 story in the Chicago Tribune, Obama said that Wright keeps his priorities straight and his moral compass calibrated.
“What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice,” Obama told the paper. “He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking truthfully about what I believe is possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.”
However, Obama has said that in the fall of 2006, he broached the subject of a run for the presidency with Wright, who encouraged him to go ahead.
As noted in a Jan. 7 Newsmax article, “Barack Obama’s Racist Church,” in sermons and interviews, Wright has equated Zionism with racism and has compared Israel with South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. On the Sunday following 9/11, Wright characterized the terrorist attacks as a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later, Wright suggested that the attacks were retribution for America’s racism.
“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” Wright wrote in Trumpet. “White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”
In one of his sermons, Wright said to thumping applause, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run! ...We [in the U.S.] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”
In an op-ed in the Philadelphia Tribune, Wright said that war is about “making the world safe” for American business interests. “When one goes against the war, one tampers with the financial institutions and the financial system that was put in place by the Founding Fathers of this country to keep the rich, rich!” he said. “The rich can only stay rich by keeping the poor, poor.”
As for Israel, “The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now,” Wright has said. “Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.”
Those views run parallel to Farrakhan’s, who said in an interview this month with FinalCall.com that there will be “no peace for Israel, because there can be no peace as long as that peace is based on lying, stealing, murder, and using God’s name to shield a wicked, unjust practice that is not in harmony with the will of God.”
Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”
According to Wright, Obama then told him, “'You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.” Wright is retiring as senior pastor of the church in May. He asked his successor, Otis Moss III, to speak instead, but he declined. However, Obama and his family prayed privately with Wright just before the presidential announcement.
The media blackout on Obama’s radical minister is in striking contrast to the coverage of Romney. Nearly half the references to Romney in the media include a discussion of his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
If Romney’s church proclaimed on its Web site that it is “unashamedly white,” the media would pounce, and Romney’s presidential candidacy would be over. Yet that is what Obama’s church says on its web site -- except in reverse.
“We are a congregation which is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian,” says the Trinity United Church of Christ’s Web site. “We are an African people and remain true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.”
Moreover, the church has a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa,” according to its Web site, and the church and its pastor subscribe to what is called the Black Value System.
While the Black Value System encourages commitment to God, education, and self-discipline, it refers to “our racist competitive society” and includes the disavowal of the pursuit of “middle-classness” and a pledge of allegiance to “all black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System.” It defines “middle-classness” as a way for American society to “snare” blacks rather than “killing them off directly” or “placing them in concentration camps,” just as the country structures “an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.”
In two exceptions to the media blackout, Tucker Carlson of MSNBC described Trinity as having a “racially exclusive theology” that “contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity.” Sean Hannity of Fox News confronted Wright on TV and asked how a black value system is any more acceptable than a white value system.
If a white presidential candidate’s church had a similar statement and “you substitute the word black for white, there would be an outrage in this country,” Hannity said. “There would be cries of racism in this country.'”
In response, Wright repeatedly asked Hannity how many books he had read by James Cone and others about black liberation theology. Cone, who is widely admired at Wright’s church, was quoted in the May 29, 2007, issue of The Christian Century as saying, “Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’... Any advice from whites to blacks on how to deal with white oppression is automatically under suspicion as a clever device to further enslavement.”
On a few points, Obama has sought to distance himself from Wright’s teachings or to explain them away. While Wright is his pastor and friend, Obama has said, they do not see eye to eye on everything. Without addressing Wright’s denunciations of Israel and Zionism as racist, Obama has said he “strongly disagrees with any portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that advocates divestment from Israel or expresses anything less than strong support for Israel’s security.”
As for Wright’s repeated comments blaming America for the 9/11 attacks, Obama has said it sounds as if the minister was trying to be “provocative.”
But Obama’s close association with Wright over more than two decades and the minister’s close ties to Farrakhan cannot be explained away so cavalierly. If Obama rejects Wright’s warped view of this country, why does he continue to attend his church? If Obama disagrees with Farrakhan and his anti-Semitic and anti-white statements, why doesn’t he denounce him rather than continue to associate with a minister and friend who is one of his advocates and who gave him an award for lifetime achievement? Does Obama secretly agree with some of their hate-filled, radical statements while publicly avoiding race-specific appeals as part of his candidacy?
That comports with Obama’s habit of not showing up for controversial votes or tackling tough policy issues, allowing him to broaden his appeal through charisma alone. Farrakhan himself recently spoke approvingly of Obama’s strategy, which is crucial to inviting whites to support him.
“Barack Obama has been very careful not to position himself as Rev. Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton as a promoter of ‘The Black Cause,’” Farrakhan said in the interview with FinalCall.com. “He has been groomed, wisely so, to be seen more as a unifier, rather than one who speaks only for the hurt of black people.”
At the least, Obama’s membership in Wright’s church and close ties to Wright himself suggest a lack of judgment and an insensitivity to views that are repugnant to the vast majority of white Americans who are not bigots or anti-Semites.
That same lack of judgment has shown up in Obama’s gaffes -- threatening to invade Pakistan and offering prompt negotiations with anti-American despots. More frightening, Obama voted last August to give Osama bin Laden and other terrorists the same rights as Americans when it comes to intercepting their overseas calls in order to pick up clues needed to stop another attack.
To evaluate what Obama’s ties to Wright mean, picture America’s reaction if President Bush’s minister, mentor, and moral compass had the views of Wright and was an admirer and supporter of Farrakhan.
“He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas,” Benjamin Franklin said.
Obama may be a gifted orator, but his choice of a friend and advisor suggests he is masquerading as a moderate. While the liberal media have already decided Obama will be our next president, Americans may have a different view when they consider what his ties to Wright tell us about the presidential candidate’s true opinions and character.
“Lucy..you got a lot a ‘splainin’ to do!”
...more ties to radical/fundamental Islam.
He won’t have to explain it. He’ll get a pass from the MSM.
Nope, the Clintonistas are going to be all over this.
The folks who spew this are not Christians! They are so far out of the will of the Almighty it boggles the mind.
How “inclusive” and “unifying” of him.
But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it's because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who've been all too eager to exploit what divides us. - Mubarack Hussein Obama
He has no business talking considering what church and denomination he belongs to.
I’m convinced Obama is a covert Black Muslim and his church is a thinly disguised Black Muslim front. I think Obama has been to the Brotherhood’s “Charm School.” The only question left who was his Mrs. Ivanova.
A separate thread asks if Obama is a Muslim. Now maybe we need to ask if Obama is a Christian. Is Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago a front for Farrakhan? And is Obama a Farrakhan puppet?
The first time I saw him I knew he looked liked a Farrakhan groomed slicker.
A Muslim, pretending to be something else.
God help us.
You beat me.
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About Us |
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http://www.tucc.org/home.htm |
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We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain "true to our native land," the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community. The Pastor as well as the membership of Trinity United Church of Christ is committed to a 10-point Vision: 1. A congregation committed to ADORATION. 2. A congregation preaching SALVATION. 3. A congregation actively seeking RECONCILIATION. 4. A congregation with a non-negotiable COMMITMENT TO AFRICA. 5. A congregation committed to BIBLICAL EDUCATION. 6. A congregation committed to CULTURAL EDUCATION. 7. A congregation committed to the HISTORICAL EDUCATION OF AFRICAN PEOPLE IN DIASPORA. 8. A congregation committed to LIBERATION. 9. A congregation committed to RESTORATION. 10. A congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY. Click here to read about Dr. Wright’s talking points for Trinity United Church of Christ its Web site and the Black Value System. |
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THE BLACK VALUE SYSTEM |
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Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System, written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee, chaired by the late Vallmer Jordan in 1981. Dr. Manford Byrd, our brother in Christ, withstood the ravage of being denied his earned ascension to the number one position in the Chicago School System. His dedication to the pursuit of excellence, despite systematic denials, has inspired the congregation of Trinity United Church of Christ. Prayerfully, we have called upon the wisdom of all past generations of suffering Blacks for guidance in fashioning an instrument of Black self-determination, the Black Value System. Beginning in 1982, an annual Black Value System – Educational Scholarship in the name of Dr. Byrd was instituted. The first recipient of the Dr. Manford Byrd Award, which is given annually to the man or woman who best exemplifies the Black Value System, was our brother, Dr. Manford Byrd. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They consist of the following concepts: 1. Commitment to God. “The God of our weary years” will give us the strength to give up prayerful passivism and become Black Christian Activists, soldiers for Black freedom and the dignity of all humankind. 2. Commitment to the Black Community. The highest level of achievement for any Black person must be a contribution of strength and continuity of the Black Community. 3. Commitment to the Black Family. The Black family circle must generate strength, stability and love, despite the uncertainty of externals, because these characteristics are required if the developing person is to withstand warping by our racist competitive society. 4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education. We must forswear anti-intellectualism. Continued survival demands that each Black person be developed to the utmost of his/her mental potential despite the inadequacies of the formal education process. “Real education” fosters understanding of ourselves as well as every aspect of our environment. Also, it develops within us the ability to fashion concepts and tools for better utilization of our resources, and more effective solutions to our problems. Since the majority of Blacks have been denied such learning, Black Education must include elements that produce high school graduates with marketable skills, a trade or qualifications for apprenticeships, or proper preparation for college. 5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence. To the extent that we individually reach for, even strain for excellence, we increase, geometrically, the value and resourcefulness of the Black Community. We must recognize the relativity of one’s best; this year’s best can be bettered next year. Such is the language of growth and development. We must seek to excel in every endeavor. 6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic. “It is becoming harder to find qualified people to work in Chicago.” Whether this is true or not, it represents one of the many reasons given by businesses and industries for deserting the Chicago area. We must realize that a location with good facilities, adequate transportation and a reputation for producing skilled workers will attract industry. We are in competition with other cities, states and nations for jobs. High productivity must be a goal of the Black workforce. 7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect. To accomplish anything worthwhile requires self-discipline. We must be a community of self-disciplined persons if we are to actualize and utilize our own human resources, instead of perpetually submitting to exploitation by others. Self-discipline, coupled with a respect for self, will enable each of us to be an instrument of Black Progress and a model for Black Youth. 8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.” Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control. 1. Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another. 2. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons. 3. Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us.” 4. So, while it is permissible to chase “middleclassness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of Black “middleclassness.” If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary” contributions to methods A and B. And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons. 9. Pledge to Make the Fruits of All Developing and Acquired Skills Available to the Black Community. 10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions. 11. Pledge Allegiance to All Black Leadership Who Espouse and Embrace the Black Value System. 12. Personal Commitment to Embracement of the Black Value System. To measure the worth and validity of all activity in terms of positive contributions to the general welfare of the Black Community and the Advancement of Black People towards freedom. |
Talking Points
Dr. Wright’s talking points (3.1.7) for Trinity United Church of Christ its Web site and the Black Value System (in response to Erik Rush’s comments (2.28.07) on the Hannity and Colmes show):
• One of the biggest gaps in knowledge that causes the kind of ignorance that you hear spouted by this man [Erik Rush] and those like him, has to do with the fact that these persons are completely ignorant when it comes to the Black religious tradition. The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ is based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone’s book, Black Power and Black Theology.
• Black theology is one of the many theologies in the Americas that became popular during the liberation theology movement. They include Hispanic theology, Native American theology, Asian theology and Womanist theology.
• I use the word “systematized” because Black liberation theology was in existence long before Dr. Cone’s book. It originates in the days of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was systematized and published by theologians, Old Testament scholars, New Testament scholars, ethicists, church historians, and historians of religion such as Dr. James Cone, Dr. Cain Hope Felder, Dr. Gayraud Wilmore, Dr. Jacqueline Grant, Dr. Kelley Brown Douglas, Dr. Renita Weems, Dr. Katie Cannon, Dr. Dwight Hopkins, Dr. Linda Thomas, and Dr. Randall Bailey.
• These scholars, who write in various disciplines, also include seminary presidents like Dr. John Kinney and professors of Hebrew Bible, like Dr. Jerome Ross. Black liberation theology defines Africans and African Americans as subjects – not the objects which colonizers and oppressors have consistently defined “others” as.
• We [African Americans] were always seen as objects. When we started defining ourselves, it scared those who try to control others by naming them and defining them for them; Oppressors do not like “others” defining themselves.
• To have a church whose theological perspective starts from the vantage point of Black liberation theology being its center, is not to say that African or African American people are superior to any one else.
• African-centered thought, unlike Eurocentrism, does not assume superiority and look at everyone else as being inferior.
• There is more than one center from which to view the world. In the words of Dr. Janice Hale, “Difference does not mean deficience.” It is from this vantage point that Black liberation theology speaks.
• Systematized Black liberation theology is 40 years old. Scholars of African and African American religious history show that Black liberation theology, however, has been in existence for 400 years. It is found in the songs, the sermons, the testimonies and the oral literature of Africans throughout the Diaspora.
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