Marzook refers to Hamas' official charter as "an essentially revolutionary document" and compares the violent creed to the Declaration of Independence, which, Marzook states, "simply did not countenance any such status for the 700,000 African slaves at that time."
They forget to mention the scope of the Independence was from across an ocean and whole new piece of land....the fight was a little religious, a little economic, a little political but, mostly about power and control.......DONT TREAD ON ME......now the snake seems to be eating it's tail....we need to get it together soon......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Charles Krauthammer Obama’s answers not good enough Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
The beauty of a speech is that you don’t just give the answers, you provide your own questions. “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.” So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which “controversial” remarks? Wright’s assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus “as a means of genocide against people of color”? Wright’s claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 — “chickens coming home to roost” — because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them? Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: “There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?” But that is not the question. The question is why didn’t he leave that church? Why didn’t he leave — why doesn’t he leave even today — a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) “God damn America”? Obama’s 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt. (a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there’s Wright, but at the other “end of the spectrum” there’s Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, “who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others? “I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother.” What exactly was Grandma’s offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus’ time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma. Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one’s time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred? (b) White guilt. Obama’s purpose in the speech was to put Wright’s outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, “We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,” and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course. This contextual analysis of Wright’s venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It’s the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That’s why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination. But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright’s rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
Sen. Barack Obama loses the presidency, he can very likely trace the beginning of the end of his unprecedented run for the White House to last week's much-discussed speech on race. He never should have gone there. It was a deadly mistake, a political blunder of the first order.
Not because what he said wasn't heartfelt, intelligent and balanced, or because it obviously reflected the unique experiences of a man with a foot each in the very different worlds of black and white America. But like so many brilliant men and women I've met in politics, Obama obviously believes his powers of observation and persuasion are far greater than they actually are. That viscerally charged issues like racism, racial divide, discrimination, affirmative action and black power can be reduced to simple, rational discourse. And that dialog inevitably leads to resolution and progress. Does not. Sometimes all it does is draw unwanted reaction, not thought. In this instance, Obama managed to roil waters that were calming down for him and create further doubts as to where he stands on angry black politics. He made the supreme mistake of assuming that just because he is ready to have a dialogue about race, so are the American people. I doubt it. We're at least a generation or two from that, but we're getting there. What the overwhelming number of white American voters wanted to hear from Obama on Tuesday was a clear, unequivocal Nancy Reagan repudiation of a man who speaks a troubling doctrine of hate against America. Just say no to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Instead, we got a "no, but." A repudiation of the words Wright spoke, but a half-hug still for the man. Well, what we say is what we stand for; it's what we are. You cannot separate the two, and the American electorate took note of that without another word being spoken. Predictably, many editorial writers and some prominent members of the intellectual community got weepy over Obama's speech, calling it groundbreaking, brilliant and on a par with Abraham Lincoln. Please. As eloquence, it was unexceptional. I will grant you it was candid and had the ring of truth about it. Did it need saying? No. Does it advance his cause? No. Does it help America become less racist? A tougher call for history to make. It might help, but that's immaterial to this political campaign. While Obama proclaimed himself not as politically naive as some think, he in fact confirmed it by giving this speech in the first place, as well as by what he said. Excusing Wright is wrong. "For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years," Obama said.I am also of the Reverend Wright's generation and can attest that there was in broad form a white counterpart to the black experience. Forty-one years ago, when I started at our sister newspaper, The Knickerbocker News, the headlines were that Newark was aflame with race riots. Tanks would soon patrol the streets of Detroit. Watts, Black Panthers, the inflammatory rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan edging out the nonviolent voice of Martin Luther King, were all part of confusion that made this country very anxious, fearful and seemingly unstable. That is the well Sen. Barack Obama dipped into with his speech Tuesday. The majority of white voters I alluded to are the majority of voters, period. And the largest block of that majority are members of my generation. That's just the way our voting patterns have been historically, regardless of what youthful appeal Barack Obama has as a candidate at the moment. Come November, it's we oldsters who turn out in droves. It's we oldsters who will elect the next president. That's why that speech was unnecessary, and counterproductive, because we oldsters didn't think much of it. Obama, for all his brilliance, misses the basic point that he himself embodies the very dialogue he wants to externalize. All he had to do was be himself, a product of black and white America, a good and decent man voicing his concerns and fears and hopes for this country -- but not try to take the American people where, frankly, they are unwilling and/or incapable of going. A dialectic over time rather than the dialogue, I am convinced, will get America the racial equality our founding fathers could not even contemplate when they created our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Two steps forward, one step back. Not with words, but with the passing of time, and the death of the generations locked into their experiences that hold the country back, like mine and the Rev. Wright's. For proof that's happening all on its own, without being pushed, just look at how much has happened that's positive in race relations in this country since the Newark headlines. And oh, by the way, look who's running for president of the United States. LeBrun can be reached at 454-5453 or by e-mail at flebrun@timesunion.com.
Mona Charen Obama can’t quite square his story Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.
It’s a mistake to try to pigeonhole Barack Obama. He is too smart and too agile to succumb to easy categorization. But the candidate’s eloquence is often more of a curtain than a window to his soul — and one is left to wonder where his heart truly lies. As George Burns said of acting, “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Discussing his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who asked God to “damn” America, who called this country the “No. 1 killer in the world,” Obama’s defense was subtle. Oh yes, he agreed, the rhetoric is “divisive ... at a time when we need unity” and refl ects “profoundly distorted views of this country” that “rightly offend both white and black.” But there’s so much more to the man. He serves his community, housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, serving those with HIV/AIDS, and so forth. He brought Obama to Christianity. And Obama can no more “disown him than he can disown the black community” and no more disown him than he can disown his own white grandmother. Obama’s white grandmother, according to the account in “Dreams from My Father,” had once flinched before a black man on a public bus — hoping that her husband would drive her to work the following day so that she could avoid him. On other occasions, he recounts, she had uttered “racial or ethnic stereotypes” that made Obama “cringe.” This is a false equivalence. In the fi rst place, what pastor or congregational leader does not minister to the poor and unfortunate? Pastoral work in the community is the norm, not the exception. One can say the same of Louis Farrakhan and Hamas for that matter. It doesn’t begin to excuse or justify stoking the flames of hatred and bitterness that Wright so flagrantly fired. And wasn’t it a bit of a cheap shot to take public aim at Grandmother, who sacrifi ced so much for Obama, who served as his surrogate mother during his high school years? If she used racial and ethnic stereotypes, that was wrong. But the episode about the bus, as related in his book, is hardly a damning indictment of a secret racist. After Obama’s grandmother confessed to having been harassed by an aggressive panhandler, Obama writes: “He (Obama’s grandfather) turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. ‘It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.’ He whispered the word. ’That’s the real reason she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.’ ”It was like a fist to my stomach, and I wobbled to maintain my composure.“ I don’t claim to know Obama’s grandmother and am in no position to judge her racial sentiments. But it does seem to an outsider that Obama’s judgment upon his grandmother is as harsh as his tolerance of Wright is benign. It isn’t as if he was raised in Trinity Baptist Church. He chose it as an adult. He chose those sermons he now calls ”incendiary“ and ”inexcusable.“ He says now that Wright misses the dynamism of American society, yet when it came time to decide where his daughters would attend church, he chose Trinity, where they would ”learn“ that the U.S. government concocted the AIDS virus to wipe out the African-American population, that the U.S. would ”plant“ WMDs in Iraq, and that blacks harming other blacks are ”fighting the wrong enemy.“ A beautifully delivered speech cannot overcome that history. The solution, Obama asserts, to racial divisiveness, is to come together and say ”Not this time.“ This time ”we want to talk about “the crumbling schools ... to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem.” This time, in other words, we can demonstrate our racial bona fides by, you guessed it, voting for Obama for president. Barack is the new kid on the block, but surely he can recall the campaign of 2000. One of the candidates that year made education reform a keystone of his effort, more or less explicitly aiming at minority kids. He called his package No Child Left Behind and denounced the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” One doesn’t expect Obama, a very liberal Democrat, to endorse George W. Bush’s programs. But it would be nice if he were not suggesting that by voting for something very similar, we are taking a bold step toward racial reconciliation and universal love.
Re March 20 Carl Strock column, “Obama: transcending race no longer”: I am shocked at Carl Strock’s assessment of Barack Obama’s speech! It seems so out of character with his broadmindedness, and reminds me more of some Christian right opinions from whom he has vehemently distanced himself. By focusing on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (whose remarks apparently were made some years ago, and taken out of context), he has missed the point that Obama was trying to make. He was asking us to look inside ourselves, at our prejudices, and try to imagine the history in which Rev. Wright and the black population have grown up. If Carl has not read the Obama books — especially “Dreams From My Father,” he will not know the turmoil which Obama found as he was growing up, and his struggle to fit into our culture as he came of age. He saw the divide and tried to transcend it. His point is that as a country we must all acknowledge that the divide still exists and both sides must be part of the solution, not exacerbate the problem. Carl’s passion for the Muslim men in Albany who were railroaded without understanding why, makes me know he has a better self. And, that’s all Barack Obama is championing in his brave reasoned, and incredibly intelligent speech. CAROLYN FELLOWS Saratoga Springs
Hillary Hits Obama: I Would Have Quit Church Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Hillary Clinton said she would have left her church if her pastor had uttered the kind of inflammatory remarks made by Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright at his Chicago church.
“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said Tuesday in an interview with reporters and editors at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
“You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”
Clinton likened Rev. Wright’s controversial sermons to “hate speech.”
She told the Tribune-Review that she “spoke out against” Don Imus, who was fired from his radio and TV shows after making racially insensitive comments, “saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that.
“I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving.”
Hillary also discussed her recent erroneous recollection that she and her traveling party came under sniper fire when their plane landed in Bosnia in 1996, saying “I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke.”
And on the topic of earmarks, Clinton told the Tribune-Review: “I am proud of my earmarks. Part of the reason that I won New York by 67 percent are my earmarks.”
A big “thank you” to Carl Strock for his excellent March 20 column about Barack Obama and his big-mouth, racist preacher, Jeremiah Wright. Barack denouncing Rev. Wright’s latest anti-America, anti-white “sermon” on TV the other day comes 20 years too late to have any meaning at all. As syndicated columnist Susan Estrich said in her March 21 column, Obama has been listening to Wright’s ranting about white America every Sunday for 20 years. Why has he decided now to disagree with him? Because now the whole world knows what Obama and his preacher are all about. This is the same Rev. Wright who married Barack and his wife and baptized their children. They are so close that Barack refers to him as Uncle Jeremiah. Barack did not have to go to this church, he chose to. Please do not keep telling me that race is not an issue in the upcoming election. What a sleazy primary season. Why couldn’t John McCain be a Democrat? NEIL NUSBAUM Schenectady
Carl Strock’s March 20 column asserts that Barack Obama “has been cozy for the past 20 years with a racial demagogue,” and thus lowered himself to the level of Eliot Spitzer. He further states that in both cases, the “private truth is ... at odds with the public persona,” and implies that this inconsistency is damaging to Obama. The preacher at Obama’s church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has been a fi erce critic of the United States, making remarks from the pulpit such as “God damn American” and other hateful, divisive statements. This appears to be the basis of Strock’s complaint. In his March 18 speech, Obama was at pains to reject these ill-tempered statements regarding the United States. He condemned Wright’s statements as divisive at a time when we need unity, and racially charged at a time when we need to come together. He objected to Wright’s view that sees white racism as endemic, which elevates what is wrong with this country and fails to recognize that progress on healing the wounds of the past is possible, though not in just one election cycle. But Obama also pointed out that these controversial outbursts from Wright are occasional and not repetitive. His experience has been that the Rev. Wright has generally had a constructive influence on his life. While he disagrees with Wright’s bitter, overstated rhetoric, he finds their mutual relationship has been sufficiently positive that he cannot disavow him. The remainder of his speech expressed a very positive outlook on the future of race relations. The reaction, as reported by the March 20 New York Times, has been unusually positive. Some have regarded the speech as among the greatest in American history. Most Americans perceive Rev. Wright as a hate-monger who preaches antagonism toward whites. Actually, he is a complex figure who is sometimes a reckless speaker. His central message is not anti-white hostility, but greater black self-reliance. He preaches “hope, hope, hope.” The Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen for the fi rst time to the black conversation, and they are thunderstruck. This demonstrates that a national dialogue on [the subject] is painful, awkward and essential — and that the dialogue needs to focus not on clips from past sermons by Rev. Wright, but on far more urgent challenges. Then we may achieve our goal of getting to not a black America, or a white America, but a United States of America. ALMY COGGESHALL Niskayuna
Don't you just love it, 3 people running for the office of President and I don't feel comfortable voting for any of them.
DITTO!!!!! Isn't there ANYONE left out there who can run for public office and be a true servant to the people? His Hillary and Obama the best the dems could give us? And is McCain the best the reps could give us?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
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