Reverend Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch .
By Mike Whitney /
"Yes, there have been death threats on both myself and on Pastor
Moss. And bomb threats at the church." Reverend Jeremiah Wright on the
media's incitement; "Bill Moyers Journal" PBS
28/04/08 "ICH" -- - Reverend Jeremiah Wright appeared on PBS Bill
Moyers Journal on Friday night and delivered a knockout punch to the
bully-boys in the cor****ate media. It was an impressive performance
that left the political assassins over at FOX News choking on their
sausage-rolls. Wright showed that he is neither a fanatic nor an
=93America hater=94; just an extremely well-read and principled man with
an unshakable commitment to justice. Wright has also paid his dues;
he's an ex-Marine who served in Vietnam when most of his critics were
either hiding behind their student deferments or langui****ng in the
"Champagne Unit" of the Texas National Guard. He's earned the right to
say whatever he chooses.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
"And the United States of America government, when it came to
treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put
them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of
Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison
camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly,
America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on
slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields,
put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put
them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs,
put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of
their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into
position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them
the drugs, builds bigger prisons, p***** a three-strike law, and then
wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America;
God damn America!
No one disputes Wright's summary of US history. His comments have
simply been taken out of context to beat up on Barak Obama; everyone
knows that. Just like everyone knows that the media has been retooled
to destroy political enemies, which means anyone who poses a challenge
to America's unelected cor****ate oligarchy. That's why it is so
frustrating to hear people say, "The media is not doing its job."
That's just plain wrong; the media IS doing its job. It's cheerleading
the country to war, it is diverting attention from the main political
and economic issues of the day, and it is destroying its political
enemies. That's what it's paid to do. Its foolish to think the media
should perform differently because of the PR nonsense about a =93free
press=94. The media gets its marching orders from its cor****ate
managers; that's who issues the paychecks on Fridays. It's their
agenda that counts, not ours. The political assassination of Barak
Obama just happens to be on the top of their list this week. That's
why the media is zeroing in on Rev. Wright; he is the sacrificial
lamb.
What the media is trying to do by singling out Wright is to make it
look like blacks are outside of the mainstream and hostile to white
American society. It's all pretty straightforward. They're trying to
create the impression that blacks conceal a deep sense of grievance
which expresses itself in rage. This generates feelings of fear among
whites which, of course, is all part of the strategy. The message is
simple; "blacks are angry, blacks are dangerous" and, oh by the way,
Obama is black.
Is it fair to say that that is essentially a racist message?
What's so clever about the attack on Wright is that it was set up
in a way to make it look like the Reverend=97a man whose entire career
has been devoted to social justice=97is a racist. That took a bit of
maneuvering. In fact, the media, and their friends at the right-wing
think tanks, had to dig through 15 years of Wright's sermons to find
just the right snippets they needed to destroy Obama. Now that's
determination! The attacks on Wright bear all the earmarks of a well-
engineered Karl Rove-type operation. Nothing has been left to chance.
All the mud-slinging and poisonous innuendo has been arranged with the
greatest attention to detail and with real professionalism. These guys
are pros. They know what it takes to ruin people and they are good at
it.
They decided the best way to go-after Obama was by using his
"blackness" against him. It took considerable skill to invoke the
"race card" without being discovered. The tables were turned in a way
that made it look like Wright and his pari****oners were the racists
and whites were merely blameless bystanders. That's the real genius of
the Wright smear-campaign.
For more than 5 months Obama had been able to run on a campaign on
issues and experience, but the attacks on Wright have changed all of
that. Now the public sees Obama as a black man; at least that's the
intention. Race has become one of the dominant issues on the campaign-
trail and Obama routinely fends off charges that blacks foster a
hidden resentment towards whites because of the way they have been
mistreated. Obama is no longer just a man running for office; now he's
a black man. That's how swift-boating works. Like they say in the
Godfather; =93It's not personal; it's just business=94. The business of
personal destruction.
Fortunately, Bill Moyers, one of the giants of journalism, decided to
give Wright a chance to acquit himself before the public. Wright took
the op****tunity and made the most of it.
Rev. Wright: =93God is the giver of life. Let me tell you what that
means. That means we have no right to take a life whether as a gang-
banger living the thug life, or as a President lying about leading a
nation into war. We have no right to take a life! Whether through the
immorality of a slave trade, or the immorality of refusing HIV/AIDS
money to countries or agencies who do not tow your political line! We
have no right to take a life!=94
Wright showed that the doctrine he preaches, Black Liberation
Theology, is neither discriminatory nor racist as the media has
suggested. Rather, it integrates the teachings of Jesus Christ with
the real-time struggle for social justice and equality. Compassion is
not possible if one does not have a grasp of one's own culture and
identity. That's why Wright tries to reconnect his congregation to
their roots, so they can be proud of who they are and have more
productive lives.
Rev. Wright:
"You know, you come into the average church on a Sunday morning and
you think you've stepped from the real world into a fantasy world. And
what do I mean by that?" He said pick up the church bulletin. You
leave a world, Vietnam, or today you leave a world, Iraq, over 4,000
dead, American boys and girls, 100,000, 200,000 depending on which
count, Iraqi dead. Afghanistan, Darfur, rapes in the Congo, Katrina,
Lower Ninth Ward, that's the world you leave. And you come in; you
pick up your church bulletin. It says, there is a ladies tea on second
Sunday. He said, "How come the faith preached in our churches does not
relate to the world in which our church members leave at the
benediction?=94
This is the essence of Black Liberation Theology; how to make sense of
the world we live in so the word of Christ can be applied in practice.
Wright thinks that faith should be a transforming experience that
changes behavior and shapes lives, not just a few hours of prayer
every week at Sunday services. Does that make it =93a race-based
theology? (as Moyers asks)
Rev. Wright: =93No, it is not. It is embracing Christianity without
giving up Africanity. ...We're not givin' up who we are as black
people to become somebody else...No mas. Nada mas. We're gonna be
ourselves. We're gonna be our culture. We're gonna be our history. And
we're gonna embrace it and not say one is superior to the other.
Because we are different. And different does not mean deficient. We
talk about God of diversity? God has diverse culture and we're proud
of who we are and that's not a race-based theology.=94
Wright has also been skewered in the media for suggesting there may be
a connection between American foreign policy and the attacks of 9-11.
The media considers any analysis that doesn't square with Bush's
crackpot "they hate our freedoms=94 theory to be either anti-American or
outright heresy. In his most famous sermon, Wright elaborates on the
"blowback" theme as well as the so-called war on terror:
"We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache,
the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took
Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them
enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed
innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the
black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed
unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working
fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his child. "Blessed are
they who bash your children's head against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We
killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in
Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of
hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day,
not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiro****ma!
We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New
York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the
playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians - not
soldiers - people just trying to make it day by day. We have sup****ted
state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and
now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now
been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are
coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred
and terrorism begets terrorism."
America has blood on its hands. America, as Martin Luther King said,
"is the greatest perpetrator of violence in the world today." So what
else is new?
What's new, is the media is using every soapbox in the country to
preach uber-nationalism and vilify America's critics as unpatriotic.
Their "Love it or leave it" gibberish is being used to tar a
presidential candidate who hasn't sufficiently prostrated himself
before his cor****ate overlords to make them feel that he can be
trusted to carry out their directives. That is what's really
happening. Obama is just unpredictable enough to make the parasite
class nervous that he might do something crazy, like serve the public
interest. That would be a real disaster. It'd be better to install the
appalling Ms. Clinton than take a chance on the =93populist=94 Obama.
That's why the wrath of the media has descended on Obama like a Texas
hailstorm; they're afraid he doesn't understand who really runs things
in America.
Wright means nothing to the media or to the men behind the curtain.
If he didn't provide an avenue for denigrating Obama, he'd be treated
with the same indifference as the thousands of other blacks who were
herded at gunpoint into the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. It's
Obama's scalp they want; that's the real prize. This is a turf war;
the big-wigs are defending their fiefdom from interlopers. They're
even rolling out the heavy artillery expecting a full-blown
conflagration. The election season is shaping up to be a real
donnybrook. Better buckle up. Obama has entered the crosshairs of
America's criminal oligarchy and things are bound to get nasty.
|
