Did Obama, in fact, hear Wright’s sermons?
Following Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama’s expressed views on evil in his appearance at Saddleback Civil Forum on August 16, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has expressed concern that his views seem to replicate the anti-American views of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of nearly twenty years.
Asked the question, ‘Does evil exist and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?’ Senator Obama answered:
“Evil does exist. I mean we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who have viciously abused their children and I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely and one of the things that I strongly believe is that, you know, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process and we can confront it when we see it. Now the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil. But, you know, a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.”
This final point is reminiscent of some of the now-notorious statements of Jeremiah Wright, who said in reference to 9/11, “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant that the stuff we have done is now brought back into our front yards [Wright is specifically referring to the 9/11 Islamist murder of 3,000 American citizens]. America‘s chickens are coming home to roost” (2003 sermon, quoted in Brian Ross & Rehab El-Buri, ‘Obama’s pastor: God damn America, U.S. to blame for 9/11,’ abcnews.go.com, March 13, 2008).
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “The ZOA has been concerned for years about the threat Islamist jihadist terror poses to The United States, Israel and the democratic world. We are therefore concerned that, in his answer to the question of confronting evil at the Saddleback Civil Forum, Senator Obama at no time referred to the totalitarian ideology of jihadist Islamism that is presently the greatest external threat confronting the United States and other democracies and which has been responsible for more murder of innocents, especially Americans and Israelis, than any other form of evil afflicting the world today. This is particularly worrying when one recalls that Senator Obama is recently on record as saying (New York Times, May 16, 2008) that Islamist terror groups like Hamas and Hizballah have ‘legitimate claims,’ and his 2007 remark to AIPAC that ‘The biggest enemy I think we have in this whole process … it’s not just terrorists, it’s not just Hezbollah, it’s not just Hamas – it’s also cynicism.’
“In his latest remarks, Senator Obama not only failed to speak about the need to confront this most threatening of evils, but he said in fact nothing about the threats to the U.S. He did not speak of preventing another 9/11 attack, in which over 3,000 innocent Americans were incinerated in a single morning. In fact, other than a reference to the genocide in Darfur, his only references to evil related to the actions of the United States or its citizens. This silence on the biggest threat facing the U.S. sounds very much like Rev. Wright, whose church he attended with his wife and daughter for twenty years, where his daughters were baptized and where he and his wife were married. It seems likely that Senator Obama listened carefully and absorbed Rev. Wright’s sermons at Trinity United Church.
“The primary duty of the president of the United States is to defend and protect America and its people, yet Senator Obama said the following: ‘Saddam Hussein was a real bad person. And there was no doubt that he meant America ill. But I was firmly convinced at the time that we did not have strong evidence of weapons of mass destruction.’ So Senator Obama says, as quoted earlier, that he supports confronting those who have massacred hundreds of thousands in Darfur but who pose no threat to America, while at the same time saying that he did not want to confront Saddam Hussein, who had massacred hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and who he admits meant to do harm to America. Do the Sudanese have weapons of mass destruction? The answer is no – they do not. Yet, Senator Obama wants to confront them, which is laudable, but would not confront Saddam Hussein, who did threaten America.
“The ZOA urges Senator Obama to come out forcefully and in unequivocal terms that he intends to deal with the gravest threats endangering America and the West, which is the threat of Islamist mass-casualty terrorism.”
