Obama's Radical Pastor

Obama's Jeremiad
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Friday, March 14, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election 2008: Imagine the uproar if John McCain's pastor used the "N"-word and asked God to "damn" blacks. Yet Barack Obama's pastor condemns whites, and liberal pundits bite their lip.

This newspaper was the first to draw attention to Obama's hate-mongering preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, and his black segregationist church in Chicago.

Our January 2007 editorial, "Obama's Real Faith," exposed their preaching of a militantly anti-white and socialist doctrine called the "Black Value System," triggering a major story in the Chicago Tribune, which led to other stories.

Now comes the leaking of recently videotaped sermons by Wright angrily condemning whites as racists and America as evil. If you close your eyes, you'd swear you were listening to the hateful rantings of uber-bigot Louis Farrakhan.

Like the Nation of Islam minister, Wright feeds his 8,500-member flock, including Obama and his family, legends about whites keeping blacks down by getting them hooked on crack and then locking them up. He even claims whites invented AIDS to destroy blacks.

Obama is not immune to such myths. Until recently, when he was informed it wasn't true, he repeated a favorite Wright line that "we've got more black men in prison than there are in college."

"The government gives (black men) drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," Wright thundered in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Locked in a Jim Crow time warp, he claims America — which he affectionately calls "the US-KKK-A" — is "controlled by and run by rich white people." Never mind that institutionalized racism is a distant memory. Or that the most popular candidate in the country right now, according to some polls, is his top acolyte.

In 2006, Wright said from the pulpit: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. And. And-and! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this sh*t!"

Wright believes all white men are responsible for the oppression of the past, and until they make atonement, there will be no forgiveness. He takes a sick joy in 9/11 as a much-deserved punishment for America supporting Israel, which he thinks should be targeted for a divestment campaign.

In a sermon to his congregation just five days after the attacks, Wright bellowed: "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 back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Lest anyone mistake who he felt was to blame for 9/11 and deserved punishment, Wright elaborated in 2005: "White America got a wake-up call after 9/11. White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just disappeared as the great white West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns."

That Obama's preacher would sound like Farrakhan is no coincidence. The two are old pals. In the '80s they traveled to Libya together to pay homage to terrorist Muammar Qaddafi. Last November, Wright honored Farrakhan with a "lifetime achievement" award and featured him on the cover of his church magazine, Trumpet.

Obama has never directly repudiated his pastor's praise for Farrakhan: "I assume that Trumpet magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders."

This is disingenuous by half. The magazine is produced by Wright's church and published by his daughters. Second, the article never mentions Farrakhan's work with ex-cons.

Obama's campaign also issued a lukewarm denunciation of Wright's leaked sermons, saying only that "there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees." Like what? We don't know. Has he ever walked out of a sermon in disgust? We don't know. But we need to know, and voters deserve to know. Now.