[THS] !!! Mike Whitney: Reverend Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19826.htm


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 corporate 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 “America hater”; 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
languishing 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, passes 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 corporate 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 “free press”. The media gets its marching
orders from its corporate 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—a man whose entire career has been
devoted to social justice—is 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 parishioners 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; “It's not personal; it's
just business”. 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
opportunity and made the most of it.

 Rev. Wright: “God 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!”


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?”


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 “a race-based theology? (as Moyers asks)

Rev. Wright: “No, 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.”


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” 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 Hiroshima! 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 supported 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 corporate 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 “populist” 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.