On Angry Black Preachers

Daniel Koffler is a friend as well as my successor at Jewcy, but we have had this disagreement in private so I see no reason not to air it in public.

In his increasingly partisan and silly attempts to define down Barack Obama's disreputable decades-long association with Jeremiah Wright, he has now taken to comparing the fetid sermons of the pastor to statements made by two figures of moral and rhetorical genius: Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not only has Daniel quoted extracts which are light years beyond the eloquence, probity and suasion of anything Rev. Wright is capable, but he has fashioned a rod for his own back in titling his post "Putting Jeremiah Wright in Context." Let us by all means do just that.

Judging from the first link he provides, it's clear Daniel did not bother to look up Douglass's full speech on July 4, 1852, choosing instead to lazily lift the extract from a reader's email sent to Andrew Sullivan, a blogger who, it is worth reminding ourselves, used to have an award named for Susan Sontag that he'd bestow upon anyone trafficking in exactly the kind of racist, ultra-leftist, anti-American blather he now contorts himself to apologize for on Wright's behalf. That extract reads as follows:

[Y]our celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Perhaps it was a space-saving measure that excised the first two sentences of this paragraph: "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." [Italics mine.]

And who could argue with that in 1852? I would no more have asked a white Northern industrialist to celebrate the birthday of the United States in its incomplete and hypocritical form, in which the Southern economy was based on human bondage and all states operated under a national covenant drawn from the highest principles of the Enlightenment, than I would a freed slave liked Douglass when the above was recited. As Douglass acidly and ironically opened his speech, making it plain that a request for his unbridled display of patriotism was made of him by some arrogant fool beforehand:

"Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodies in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?"

So you might say that the Fourth of July had it coming. It should also be noted that Thomas Paine or John Brown wrote like this in their passionate attempts to erase the foundational stain of slavery. (Douglass himself maintained that his father was white, so I wonder at what point of diluted negritude an abolitionist's sane pleas for social justice would be immune from such sickening analogies to modern-day frauds.)

Here is how Douglass concluded his remarks on that day, offering a course of action that could redeem the young republic on its own terms — precisely the sort of thing that Rev. Wright, in his unlettered, hate-filled and conspiracist harangues, chooses not to do:

"Fellow citizens! The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.

Oh be warned! Be warned! A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!"

 

As for Dr. King's noble opposition to the Vietnam War, and his words to that effect — these pilfered by Daniel from E.J. Dionne's latest column in the Washington Post — nothing here strikes me as remotely comparable to Wright's effusions:

"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

King is right on the essentials: the U.S. was guilty of war crimes in Vietnam. The above may have been controversial for 1968, but today it is hauntingly close to the conventional wisdom about a disgraceful period in our nation's foreign policy. (I wish King hadn't had recourse to divine retribution, but nobody's perfect.)

I don't think, forty years on, the same will be said of Jeremiah Wright's bull session on international affairs. Here is how he accounts for the American response to 9/11:

"We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed enemies. We want revenge, we want payback, and we don't care who gets hurt in the process."

Wright grounds this malediction in the famous Psalm 137, which relates to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C and the retroactive Zionism of the Jews, now lamenting the state of their exile. The hymn ends thus:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us- he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

Wright quotes the gruesome final couplet (how moral are the teachings of religion) to argue that the United States, under the guidance of its "men of faith" (read: the president), murders women and children deliberately out of cold vengeance. This is indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden's pronouncements about our intentional collapsing of "mud villages" over the heads of Muslim mothers and their babes.

Wright is at once too general and too specific. He cites in this particular sermon — helpfully added to YouTube by Trinity United Church itself, under the eye-catching heading "FOX Lies!!!" — that the bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan claimed the lives of "hundreds" of civilians. There was one fatality. And however much the timing of that bombing may have resulted from Bill Clinton's "wag the dog" scheme to distract from the Lewinsky affair, it was later defended cogently by the counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and David Benjamin and Richard Simon, authors of The Age of Sacred Terror, all of whom showed that viable U.S. intelligence indicated the factory was in fact being used by Al Qaeda to manufacture chemical weapons.

All told, Daniel picked a lousy day to defend Obama on his religious affiliations. Comes the news that on the "Pastor's Page" of the July 22, 2007 newsletter of the Trinity United Church, Wright chose to reprint approvingly an LA Times op-ed written by one Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas. In it, Marzook of course defends the use of terrorism against Israeli civilians (dashing infants heads against the rocks is selectively appropriate, one would assume) and rejects any precondition that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist. What must have especially caught Wright's eye in this license for mass murder and Judeocide is the passage in which Marzook brings up the Declaration of Independence and American slavery. Good to know how Jeremiah Wright thinks Palestinian self-determination should work.

Context is everything, isn't it? Daniel may wish to argue that, at bottom, Wright is no different than Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, or any number of febrile leftists in our midst. But I suspect he knows what a pickle it would be to explain to voters why such a person has had the ear of, and served as metaphysical counsel to, the Democratic front-runner for president. So instead we get hastily assembled carnival comparisons to MLK and Frederick Douglass; insults to them and insults to history.

However, if Daniel is still not impressed by Jeremiah Wright, I have another humdinger of an Obama religious adviser that might just do the trick.

Meet the Rev. James Meeks. I quote from the gay rights website Queerty*:

Rev. James Meeks is a close friend and spiritual consultant to Sen. Obama. Rev. Meeks appeared in TV ads for Obama’s US Senate campaign; Obama campaigned at his church; and went there for prayer the night he won that primary. Meeks was on his exploratory committee for the Presidency, and his church choir performed at a rally for Obama the night he announced. Rev. Meeks is also an Illinois state senator who has aggressively campaigned against gay rights and complained about “Hollywood Jews for bringing us ‘Brokeback Mountain’.” He ran for governor on an antigay platform. He calls being gay an “evil sickness,” and his gigantic church is one of those which sponsors a Halloween fright night in which, according to the “Chicago Sun Times,” among those “consigned to the flames of hell” were “two mincing young men wearing body glitter who were supposed to be homosexuals.” His church has also launched antigay petition drives for the Illinois Family Institute, and Meeks is also aligned with Antigay Industry powerhouses Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defense Fund, and Americans for Truth that proclaims “fighting AIDS without talking against homosexuality is like fighting lung cancer without talking against smoking.” We do not know if Sen. Obama was also too busy campaign for US Senate to “go after him” as he’s said he can do to get others to do the right thing. We only know that his close friend and advisor, the Rev. & Sen. James Meeks voted against SB3186, against LGBT equality in Illinois, and is apparently, just like Donnie McClurkin, just as homohating as he was before ever meeting Barack Obama.

Here is how Meeks sings the body electric:

Just another angry black preacher. Never fear. I'm sure there's a photograph floating around somewhere of Meeks gladhanding the Clintons to make this sickly Obama association null and void, too.

*Ed note: The reference to Meeks is from a comment on a profile of three gay Obama supporters. His information, however, can be substantiated. The Chicago Sun-Times piece referring to "Fright Night" is available here. An excerpt from Cathleen Falsani's book on Obama's spirituality, which mentions the Meeks connection, is available here. See also David Ehrenstein's brief against Meeks in the Chicago Tribune, here.