terrorism:
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.
Other sermons included charges that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill black people, and that Israel and South Africa invented an ethnic bomb that would kill Arabs and blacks but spare whites and Jews. Wright endorsed Louis Farrakhan—anti-Semitism and all—and traveled with him to visit Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He called the United States “the U.S. of KKK A,” and recommended that the slogan “God bless America” be changed to “God damn America.”
Yet even with all this material so readily available, when Obama disinvited Wright from making the invocation at the official launch of his presidential campaign in March 2007, the Times reported on Wright’s radical comments in a way that blandly euphemized them, and characterized Trinity United as a “mainstream” church, scrubbing the more extreme aspects of its Afrocentric theological bearings. A follow-up article by Jodi Kantor at the end of April referred to Wright as “a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.” Kantor referred to Wright’s “assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government,” but left out the “God damn America,” and instead of reporting that Wright believed and preached that the U.S. government invented AIDS as a tool of racial euthanasia, she merely said that “Like conservative Christians, he speaks of AIDS as a moral crisis.” Of the controversial 9/11 remarks, she simply wrote that “On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies.”
Kantor also gave Obama a wide berth to contextualize Wright’s remarks and explain how he was probably “trying to be provocative.” Reverend Wright was “a child of the 60s,” Obama noted, “and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with
institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through.... He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.”
In March 2008, almost a year after Kantor’s airbrushed pieces, ABC News broadcast the most incendiary of the clips from Wright’s sermons it had secured, including “No, no, no, not God bless America; God damn America!” This triggered a media frenzy, putting Obama in the harshest spotlight he would face in his campaign.
The Times duly reported on the controversy, and finally reported Wright’s inflammatory remarks about 9/11, although it didn’t directly quote “God damn America” in any news story and didn’t address Obama’s blatant lies about not knowing of Wright’s offensive statements. Even some Obama backers, such as Gerald Posner, were dubious: “If the parishioners of Trinity United Church were not buzzing about Reverend Wright’s post 9/11 comments, then it could only seem to be because those comments were not out of character with what he preached from the pulpit many times before.”
The “no-go” zone that the Times erected around Obama also encompassed “black liberation theology,” to which Reverend Wright was committed. On the Trinity United website, Wright cited James Cone, a professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, as the one who “systematized” this strain of Christianity. Cone had written, “If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.” In the Times, however, black liberation theology came off merely as
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.
Other sermons included charges that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill black people, and that Israel and South Africa invented an ethnic bomb that would kill Arabs and blacks but spare whites and Jews. Wright endorsed Louis Farrakhan—anti-Semitism and all—and traveled with him to visit Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He called the United States “the U.S. of KKK A,” and recommended that the slogan “God bless America” be changed to “God damn America.”
Yet even with all this material so readily available, when Obama disinvited Wright from making the invocation at the official launch of his presidential campaign in March 2007, the Times reported on Wright’s radical comments in a way that blandly euphemized them, and characterized Trinity United as a “mainstream” church, scrubbing the more extreme aspects of its Afrocentric theological bearings. A follow-up article by Jodi Kantor at the end of April referred to Wright as “a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.” Kantor referred to Wright’s “assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government,” but left out the “God damn America,” and instead of reporting that Wright believed and preached that the U.S. government invented AIDS as a tool of racial euthanasia, she merely said that “Like conservative Christians, he speaks of AIDS as a moral crisis.” Of the controversial 9/11 remarks, she simply wrote that “On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies.”
Kantor also gave Obama a wide berth to contextualize Wright’s remarks and explain how he was probably “trying to be provocative.” Reverend Wright was “a child of the 60s,” Obama noted, “and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with
institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through.... He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.”
In March 2008, almost a year after Kantor’s airbrushed pieces, ABC News broadcast the most incendiary of the clips from Wright’s sermons it had secured, including “No, no, no, not God bless America; God damn America!” This triggered a media frenzy, putting Obama in the harshest spotlight he would face in his campaign.
The Times duly reported on the controversy, and finally reported Wright’s inflammatory remarks about 9/11, although it didn’t directly quote “God damn America” in any news story and didn’t address Obama’s blatant lies about not knowing of Wright’s offensive statements. Even some Obama backers, such as Gerald Posner, were dubious: “If the parishioners of Trinity United Church were not buzzing about Reverend Wright’s post 9/11 comments, then it could only seem to be because those comments were not out of character with what he preached from the pulpit many times before.”
The “no-go” zone that the Times erected around Obama also encompassed “black liberation theology,” to which Reverend Wright was committed. On the Trinity United website, Wright cited James Cone, a professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, as the one who “systematized” this strain of Christianity. Cone had written, “If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.” In the Times, however, black liberation theology came off merely as
Similar Books
![Hyacinth, Scarlet - Craving Owen [Tides of Love 2] (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme Forever ManLove)](https://fs.ageofbook.com/578902/thumbs/152x264/hyacinth-scarlet-craving-owen-tides-of-love-2-siren-publishing-lovextreme-forever-manlove.jpg)
