First, there was this article in the Chicago Sun Times, Vandals Deface Three Local Synagogues:

Vandals spray-painted the words “Death to Israel’’ on two synagogues and a Jewish school early Saturday in three separate incidents police say could be linked and are being investigated as hate crimes.

In each case, the vandals — at times donning masks — used orange-colored paint, also shattering glass windows with bricks and rocks at two of the buildings.

A witness and security cameras identified the perpetrators as two men.

Moshe Perlstein, rabbi at Lubavitch Mesivta of Chicago, said cameras captured video of the men damaging his rabbinical school at 2756 W. Morse starting at around 4:40 a.m. The footage shows one man spray-painting the side of the building while the other ran around to the front and threw rocks at the front door, breaking a glass window, he said. The video has been turned over to police.

That was not the end of it. There was more:

Similar graffiti was found at Anshe Motele Congregation, 6526 N. California, rabbi Alan Abramson said.

Lincolnwood police said vandals also scrawled “Death to Israel’’ and “Free Palestine’’ on the outside walls of Lincolnwood Jewish Congregation, 7117 N. Crawford. Mitchell Sandler, past president of the congregation, said they threw at least two bricks at the front doors, damaging four windows.

Lincolnwood Police Lt. Mark Brines said police were notified at 6:10 a.m. that a caretaker in the building heard a brick crash through a window at the temple. The caretaker saw “two unknown males running from the scene,’’ Brines said.

Because all three buildings were used by orthodox Jews, Sandler said it appeared the men were targeting more devout Jews.

“This was a cowardly act in the middle of the night,’’ Sandler said. “Obviously there is dismay because of what’s been happening in the Middle East.’’

Local Jewish leaders were alarmed by what they see as a “rash’’ of incidents targeting Jews.

“It’s disturbing,’’ said Jay Tcath, senior vice president of the Chicago Jewish Federation.

Disturbing, indeed. Whenever a group is targeted, when a hate crime occurs, it is disturbing. And there is yet more:

The incidents come a little more than a week after Ida Crown Jewish Academy, at 2828 W. Pratt, received a mailed bomb threat that also made reference to other Chicago-area Jewish institutions and day schools, said Jay Tcath, senior vice president of the Chicago Jewish Federation.

And police said they are investigating as a hate crime a Dec. 29 incident in which a man hurled a Molotov cocktail at Temple Sholom of Chicago, 3480 N. Lake Shore Dr., after making “derogatory comments’’ to a passerby.

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has been notified, police said.

No arrests have been made.

Next, Jewish Odysseus had this disturbing story via Mugata: German “Police” Join Jew-Hating Muslim Mob:

1:16 AM Received from Muqata Blog Reader in Germany, Sebastian M.

Today, 10.000 people demonstrated against Israel here in my hometown Duisburg (Germany) and to express their solidarity with Hamas. So, my girlfriend and me put two Israel flags out of the windows of our flat in the 3rd floor. During the demonstration which went through our street the police broke into our flat and removed the flag of Israel. The statement of the police was to de-escalate the situation, because many youth demonstrators were on the brink of breaking into our apartment house. Before this they threw snowballs, knifes and stones against our windows and the complete building. We both were standing on the other side of the street and were shocked by seeing a police officer standing in our bedroom and opening the window to get the flag. The picture illustrate this situation. The police acquiesced in the demands of the mob.

That’s a police officer removing the flag of Israel, just in case you couldn’t tell.

I understand that many people are angry and frustrated with Israel right now. I really do. Larry Johnson had a great piece on this very issue at No Quarter (”This Will Sicken You“). They are not innocent bystanders in this current conflict with Gaza, as they move into deeply populated areas clearly indicates.

That being said, I don’t think it is a stretch to say that for something like this to happen in Germany, for police officers to join in with an anti-Jew mob, raises a pretty ugly specter. We HAVE seen this before, and none of us can allow that to stand. Despite Israel’s incursions into Gaza, we cannot allow the pendulum to swing that far back again. Not in Germany. Not in Israel. Not in Gaza. Not in Bosnia. Not in Serbia. Not in Rwanda. We must be vigilant that this kind of atrocity does not happen again, that groups are not slaughtered for their ethnicity, their religious beliefs, or their political beliefs. We must be brokers for peace.

There is a group who does just that, for Israel and Palestine. For any place where there is war or injustice. Women in Blackis a collective of peace activists who realize that women have a different perspective of war. When I lived in Cambridge, Arabic and Jewish women would hold vigils – together – to call for an end to the violence between Israel and Palestine. They represented the mothers, sisters, daughters of people who had been, or were being killed. They represented the ones who brought forth those who were being killed, or tended to the wounded. Yes, they had a different perspective, indeed. Some of them had seen firsthand the devastation in the Middle East. From their website:

Who are Women in Black?

Women in Black… is a world-wide network of women committed to peace with justice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism and other forms of violence. As women experiencing these things in different ways in different regions of the world, we support each other’s movements. An important focus is challenging the militarist policies of our own governments. We are not an organisation, but a means of communicating and a formula for action.

It is a start to end the violence, not just in Israel and Gaza, but around the world. Mothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, granddaughters and nieces, working to end injustice in the world, and violence, whether on a whole scale like war, or on the home front, like domestic violence. These women unite for that – peace. And that would be a cause well worth “fighting” for, wouldn’t it?

“Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.”

Israel is right to attack Hamas in Gaza. The Palestinians are wrong to have elected Hamas as their leaders. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Gaza is being lead by an illegitimate terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel. This “government,” put in place by Palestinians, has repeatedly attacked Israel with hundreds of rockets, suicide bombers, and decades of unthinkable bloodshed and fear.

Israel is not trying to win a popularity contest on the world stage, and nightly news showing civilian causalities is heartbreaking and does nothing to endear the world to the Jewish state. But Israel is following the American model of toppling the Taliban: if you support and harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. Hamas is aware of anti-Israel sentiment and they have a history of fabricating “atrocities” to inflame the world against Israel.

The American Left distrusts power, the military, and the use of force. As the bumper sticker says, they’re “already against the next war.” But I’ve noticed another disturbing trend: left wing anti-Semitism.

Before I point this out I want to make two points. First, I am not Jewish; my ancestry is English and Christian. Secondly, I understand that most people who oppose Israel’s current actions are not anti-Semitic.

However, there is a virulent strain of antisemitism on the American Left. I believe that the moral equivalence argument and analogy between the State of Israel and the Nazi regime is anti-Semitic. The atrocities committed by the Nazi clique, mass murder on an industrial scale (some camps murdering 20,000 souls per day), was an evil so grotesque and nearly beyond comprehension that special care must be taken when speaking about an event which cost so many innocents their lives.

Israel is a secular, multi-ethnic democracy who is defending herself against a terrorist organization. Hamas like Al-Qaeda, is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by Canada, the European Union, Israel, Japan, and the United States, and is banned in Jordan, Australia, and the United Kingdom.”

The allegedly intelligent blogger, Joseph Cannon, has posted an image based on Nazi propaganda. The soldier’s Swastika has been replaced with a Star of David. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Cannon then uses select quotes from the Bible’s books Deuteronomy and Joshua to attack the secular Jewish State. This selective quoting of religious texts to attack a people is a familiar form of religious bigotry perpetrated on Muslims and Christians today and, historically, on Jews, as if Jews today have to answer for every word of a 5,000 year old religion. Cannon is engaged in Jew-baiting, and it’s despicable.

Additionally, Cannon uses the canard that Israel possess “stolen” land. He writes: “keep in mind that this story is about land theft, pure and simple. The Lord is here the ultimate fall guy, the original Nuremburg excuse: ‘Hey, we didn’t want to commit genocide; we were only following orders.’”

It’s unfortunate that Cannon uses the Nazi tribunals and religious text as a comparison to a secular democracy defending itself from terrorists’ attacks.

Cannon’s writing then veers close to Der Stürmer, the anti-Semitic rag of Nazism:

Too many Jews learned the wrong lesson from World War II. The victims of persecution came to equate strength with a willingness to persecute others. Like many other peoples in many other times and places, a large number of Jews were seduced into the false belief that the hardest heart beats longest.

But history teaches a very different lesson. Hitler’s Germany did not last. The Third Reich was destroyed for its evil. Germany was divided like an earthworm. Yet it recovered. Who can deny that — in the long run — the best thing ever to happen to Germany was the eradication of its government and its (temporary) loss of national sovereignty at the end of World War II?

~snip~

Israel must be destroyed, just as Hitler’s Germany was destroyed. All Jews throughout the world must forevermore rid themselves of the lunatic, racist dream of “Jewish state.” Jews living in Israel will either agree to live in a single multi-ethnic democracy in which everyone ruled (directly or indirectly) by the government has an equal vote — or they will die in their madness.

The madness of Cannon’s thesis is his shameful omission of Hamas’ terrorism, the numerous murders, suicide bombers, rockets launched at innocent Israeli citizens, and kidnapping of IDF soldiers. He deplores the establishment of a Jewish state, but ignores the goal of Hamas to establish an Islamic state. Nor does he mention that Israel does have non-Jewish citizens, including Muslims, Druze, and Christians. His rage is directed at the idea that a people can establish a homeland, but clearly he is uneducated at the plight of Jews in pre-World War Two Europe. He claims that “too many Jews learned the wrong lesson in World War Two,” but he fails to note that the assimilated Jews of Europe were nearly all murdered exactly because they had no where to turn when anti-Semitism reared its ugly head.

Cannon then goes on to say that the “Old Testament,” is evil:

In my explorations, I have never found any other “sacred” text dripping with the inexcusable bloodlust and hate one can find in the Old Testament. My sympathies now lie with the Gnostics, who considered much of that book evil

Cannon is referring to the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. His ignorance is profound. The Jewish Torah (as it’s called in Judaism) and the Old Testament are not identical. This shows his utter ignorance and bigotry. But of course Cannon is not alone.

In a similar vein, a commentator named Alibe on American Girl in Italy’s recent post writes:

The current war between Hamas and Israel is not war. This is the equivalent of The Germans clearing out the Warsaw Ghetto. Gaza has been a ghetto. Israel has treated the people of gaza as less than human. They have tried to control every aspect of life in Gaza. Just as the Nazis tried to control the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the Israelis have morphed into the Nazis and now use the same thinking the Nazis did.

Besides the author’s ahistorical understanding of the Holocaust, the analogy also falls apart when you point out that the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were not launching rockets at the civilian population of Poland nor did they have it as their charter to destroy the nation of Germany — although Germany’s anti-Semitic propaganda claimed they did.

As I wrote on the same post:

Land was not “taken away” from Palestinians. Jewish holocaust survivors [and others] fought the British who controlled a colony the British called Palestine, which was never a Palestinian state. In fact, there has never been a country called Palestine. There’s a democracy in that region, called Israel, which continues to be attacked by a terrorist government, called Hamas. Israel is now dismantling this terrorist organization, an organization — by the way — whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and who has killed thousands of Israelis.

Israel is open to criticism. And friends of Israel, like Larry Johnson, have been critical of this military action against Hamas in Gaza.

Liberal antisemitism is hateful and ubiquitous. A Daily Kos diarist, Susan Jumper, wrote that she’d like to “gas” the Jewish Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and others on her post compared Sen. Lieberman to a dog that should be killed.

Similarly, during an anti-Israel demonstration in Florida, protesters shouted:

“Did Israel take notes during the Holocaust? Happy Hanukkah.”

And:

To the dozen or so supporters of Israel gathered across the street, one demonstrator shouted: “Murderers! Go back to the ovens! You need a big oven.”

While it’s inflammatory to call someone a Nazi, I believe it’s anti-Semitic to call Israelis Nazis. Just as it’s correctly verboten for whites to use the N-word, it’s equally offensive to engage in this not so subtle form of Jew-baiting. Barely disguised anti-Semitism (or the outright murderous fantasies of Daily Kos’ Susan Jumper, Joseph Cannon, and the protesters in Florida) have become très chic in Europe and the United States. We can argue over matters of policy, but false comparisons, attacks based on religious texts, and code words have no place in our discourse. It’s important to point out that words have implications, and it’s clear that anti-Semitism is being implied.

As Israelis say about the Holocaust, Never Again. Never again.

Wow, the memories this story brings back! Do any of the rest of you remember the utterly insane General Tony McPeak who Obama, straight-faced, introduced as his chief military adviser? (Which made us all gasp with genuine fear?)

I wonder where Gen. McPeak is these days? Have any of you seen him anywhere recently? Is he maybe 7,000 miles away under that bus in American-Samoa along with Howard Dean?

[See: "Notable Absence of Howard Dean, January 9, 2009."]

Gen. Tony McPeak, Obama’s top military adviser, was interviewed by a newspaper about the Israeli/Palestinian peace process:

The interviewer asked McPeak: “So where’s the problem? State? White House?”

McPeak replied: “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.”

Translation (as if it’s needed): Jews — who put Israel over every American interest — control America’s policy on the Middle East. And McPeak has the audacity to accuse Bill Clinton of McCarthyism.

For more on Gen. McPeak, read Larry Johnson’s post, “Senator Obama, Have You No Decency?” [The photo above comes from Saturday's rally in Medford, Oregon. Larry quotes from their speeches at that rally.]

Below, “Obama church published Hamas terror manifesto: Compares charter calling for murder of Jews to Declaration of Independence,” along with the PDF of the actual Obama church bulletin:

More:

Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group’s official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America’s Declaration of Independence.

Yet more:

The revelation follows a recent WND article quoting Israeli security officials who expressed “concern” about Robert Malley, an adviser to Obama who has advocated negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group.

In his July 22, 2007, church bulletin, Wright reprinted an article by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the newsletter as a “deputy of the political bureau of Hamas.” A photo image of the newsletter was captured and posted today by the business blog BizzyBlog. The Hamas piece was first published by the Los Angeles Times, garnering the newspaper much criticism.

According to senior Israeli security officials, Marzook, who resides in Syria alongside Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal, is considered the “brains” behind Hamas, designing much of the terror group’s policies and ideology. Israel possesses what it says is a large volume of specific evidence that Marzook has been directly involved in calling for or planning scores of Hamas terrorist offensives, including deadly suicide bombings. He was also accused of attempting to set up a Hamas network in the U.S. …

He tried to set up a Hamas network in the U.S. Yet, Obama’s pastor for 20 years thinks so highly of him that he posts his writings in the CHURCH BULLETIN? I hardly know what to say.

NOTE: I have uploaded the actual church bulletin: tuccbulletin_july22.pdf

The “Pastor’s Page” (Jeremiah Wright’s page) features this: “A FRESH VIEW OF THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE,” written by Mousa Abu Marzook.

ALSO: Someone used multiple usernames, fake e-mail addresses, and multiple IP numbers to spam this comment area. I wanted to write an e-mail to have a calm discussion with the person, but that's not possible because I can't write to fake e-mail addresses. If you wish to undo your suspension, you have to e-mail me at susanunpc at gmail dot com, and we will discuss this rationally. No one is permitted to use fake e-mail addresses if for no other reason than we need, sometimes, to be able to e-mail you! We ALWAYS prefer a resolution to suspension, but you have to make yourself available by using a legitimate e-mail address (which NO ONE ELSE sees except Larry and me).]

Is puma the new jew – a people persecuted for their beliefs, and eventually for their failure to fall in line, and follow the chosen one?

Now, I am not saying that PUMAS have been subjected to the horrors of the holocaust, or the years and years of persecution, but I thought it was a snappy intro that might grab your attention.

I started this post with the intent of trying to better understand the current Israel/Hamas conflict, by creating *what if’s*. I thought if I brought the concepts *home* I might be able to better understand the anger and outrage coming from both sides. The process, and research led me to thinking about the hate directed towards one group for holding beliefs different than the majority, which brings me to the comment, *is puma the new jew*.

For example, following 9/11, do I think the US had a right to launch a nuclear attack on Al Qaeda territory? The attack on 9/11 was massive, devastating, and had lasting effects, and still does. Would I have approved of a massive attack, including dropping a nuclear bomb in the heart of Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or wherever they were hiding? Honestly, for about 30 seconds, I probably would have ok’d it. But, too many innocent lives would have been lost, and as much damage 9/11 did, I would never want to inflict that kind of damage on innocent civilians.

Or, another example. Take Iraq. Thousands, hundreds of thousands?, of Iraqi civilians have died because of the US decision to invade and drive Saddam from power. There has been massive devastation to the infrastructure and massive amounts of casualties. Do the Iraqi people have a justification to drop a nuclear bomb in the US? They have been living in a war zone for 6 years. Now, I know that a lot of the fighting has been coming from al Qaeda and Iraqi resistance but I also see on TV a lot of Iraqis who view the US as occupiers. Would they be justified in a massively disproportionate response like a nuclear bomb? (My answer would be no, btw.)

Or how about, as Wright said, the idea that on 9/11 our *chickens came home to roost*. The US, however you feel about our foreign policy, is viewed as having done a lot of good, and a lot of bad, around the world. Al Qaeda, who believe the US has done a lot of bad in the world flew planes into the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and attempted into the White house or Capital, killing thousands of civilians. Should that be viewed as a proportional or non-proportional attack on the US? Sure seemed non-proportional to me! We are told that Al Qaeda attacked us for our continued influence in Muslim countries, and the US support of Israel. Apparently, after years of (perceived?) intrusive behavior from the US, they launched a massive assault on the US. Osama Bin laden said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital. (Personally, I don’t think it is possible to provide rational thought to religious extremists.)

Anyway, these are scenarios I kicked around in my brain, trying to come to an understanding of the Israeli/Hamas conflict. As I was pondering these scenarios, my mind wandered to why Hamas, and all Muslim countries want to eliminate Israel’s existence. Why do Muslims hate Jews? Is it just based on their religious beliefs? I ask because Jews have been persecuted throughout history, long before the UN decision in ‘47. Or is it because the UN established the Partition Plan for Palestine (which I don’t think they were too happy about)? Or more so because Israel fought, and expanded their borders beyond the Partition Plan? Or has Israel done things to Muslim countries? (I’m asking.)

I don’t understand, and am trying to, the reasons at the heart of the attacks on Israel, and the passionate defense of either side, on this web site, and around the world. Is Israel 100% without fault, and innocent, suffering at the hands of terrorist attacks, and within their right to respond as they are, on Gaza? (I’m asking.) Is their any validity in the attacks by Hamas, and Muslim countries as to their hatred of Israel? (I’m asking.) Heck, should the Partition Plan even have happened, and was it *legal*? And if so, I would assume that Israel does have the right to exist, and they are being terrorized. Is there anything that will resolve this situation? Will redrawing the borders back to the 1947 Plan work? What??

Anyway, from there, I started thinking about Jewish people in Israel, and how they live in such a small country surrounded by countries that hate them. And I was, as I said above, trying to figure out the reasons why. I know it has been written about, blogged about, talked about, to death, but I like to simplify things so I understand them.

I was reading around in the blogosphere, and reading a lot of other blogs, especially ones attacking Larry for his comments about the disproportionate response by Israel (which labeled him anti-Semitic and got rather ugly and nasty) I found myself reading lots of hateful posts about PUMAS. Honestly, I was shocked. Now, having lived through the past year or two, blogging and commenting about my support for Hillary, and initial like, but growing dislike for all things Obama, I knew there was lots of anger towards Hillary supporters.

I have written many times before, that from the day I eagerly logged on, put my fingers to the keys, and proudly wrote, *I support Hillary.* I was attacked, called a racist, and worse. (And, I even liked Obama in the beginning. Didn’t know anything about him, but thought he looked interesting, and wanted to get to know more. It was when I began to learn more, that I fell out of favor.)

The divide in the Dem party grew and grew, with Hillary supporters frustration and anger growing as the primary went on, and the hatred spewing from the Obama supporters worsening. Hillary supporters (and yes, not all are perfect. There were some racist comments made by a small group of people, and yes, some even got nasty, but I think as a whole, people just believed that Hillary was the best candidate – and there were some who were for Edwards in the beginning, and when he dropped out, they preferred Hillary over Obama) were, dare I say, victimized because they weren’t buying into the One. We became disenchanted with our party, outraged at the tactics used, the racist cards thrown, the death threats, etc. And personally, the way the media behaved, woke me from my liberal media bubble and made me re-evaluate the way I saw the Right, and the past eight years. I didn’t become *an angry puma* until I was subjected over and over again to attacks for my support of my candidate, and watched the primary unfold, and the attacks on my candidate.

Now, as I peruse the blogosphere, I am appalled at so many attacks on PUMAS. I don’t even want to say PUMAS, but Hillary supporters. There were so many different PUMA factions, and different *leaders* and groups, and blogs, that it never really became a well-oiled organization. It was just a whole lot of pissed off voters, who didn’t like what they saw happening, and tried to take a stand, and make their voices heard, as quickly as possible. Some more so than others, some till the day they die. Honestly, even though I called myself a PUMA, I never really followed any of the groups, I just rejected Obama, and the Democrat party, and found others, like me.

Now, this brings me all the way back to my beginning, *is puma the new jew*. A people persecuted for their beliefs, and eventually for their failure to fall in line, and follow the chosen one.

To bring Judaism into modern times, the last 2000 years, Jews rejected Jesus as the son of God, which was a major turning point in western history. Jesus was a major game changer in our history. The acceptance of Jesus changed things politically and religiously.

Personally, I see this more so in a political arena, than a religious one, of the Jewish elders reluctance to Jesus as the son of God. I think they saw him as gaining a huge following, and gaining strength as a leader. Perhaps they just didn’t believe him, or what he claimed, or perhaps they were afraid of losing power. But Jesus arrived at a time ripe for change. He had garnered a huge following. Some people chose to believe he was *The Chosen One*, the Savior, the Holy One, and others didn’t. Jesus was a Jew, so he wasn’t some stranger from a strange land. He was one of them. But he divided the *party*. Those who followed him, and those who didn’t, whatever the reasons.

But, whatever the reason, they did not accept that Jesus was the savior. They didn’t believe or accept that he was The Chosen One, or sent down from God, as his son, and they have paid for their beliefs ever since.

But wasn’t that their right? To reject an idea or belief of someone else? To reject someone who claims to be the *chosen one* the *one we have been waiting for*? If you don’t believe that this one, is the one, is that not your right?

If you find fault in someone, or try to bring to light something you see as false, isn’t that your right? If you believe, with all of your being, that something is not right, and that what someone is selling is not worthy of buying, isn’t it your right to reject it, to speak out about it?

Why must we hate those who disagree, and speak out for what they believe?

I wrote an email to some friends yesterday about how we have been divided, and I feel lost in the middle somewhere, attacked or offended from both sides, sometimes. I am no longer a Democrat, or Republican, but independent. I read many conservative sites now, but still feel a bit offended every so often, when I read an attack on climate change, or on Hillary or Bill, or on gay marriage, etc. And I can’t enjoy liberal sites anymore, they are too biased towards Obama, or were too vicious during the primary for me to return, or continue to attack Hillary supporters. And I don’t trust them anymore. So, what to do? I am not going to just roll over and give in and start drinking the kool-aid…. especially when the Obama supporters are (slowly) starting to see the light! But if you take a spin in the liberal blogo-zone, you will get the point I am trying to make about all the nasty hate being lobbed our way.

So, for all the haters who will want to jump on me, and say that I am comparing/putting on a level playing field, the hatred towards pumas to the persecution of Jews, calm down. I’m not.

But, I did garner a bit of understanding into what it must feel like, as a Jewish person (and I am talking about Jewish people as individuals, not as a country, and discussing their politics), to be a relative minority, that chose a belief different than the majority, and to be hated for that choice. And not just hated, but to be attacked, and to be wished extinct. Just for believing in something different.

It sucks. And it’s sad.

Richard Cohen’s sister is canceling her inauguration party because of President-elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to bless Mr. Obama’s taking the office of the Presidency of the United State.

According to her brother’s column in the Washington Post, what made her do this is the way in which Mr. Obama’s choice to pick this pastor for this occasion serves as a special sort of condoning of Mr. Warren’s views about gays and lesbians.

I agree with Richard Cohen, and apparently his sister, that these views should be regarded as totally unacceptable by anybody who has any sense of the importance of civil rights and indeed of human rights. I also agree with Richard Cohen’s view that as a somebody running for the office of President and who was at the time a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama had a particular responsibility for denouncing his then-pastor’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for giving the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan a special award during the primary season.

I find it troubling that neither Mr. Cohen nor apparently his sister have not been, as far as I can tell, overly concerned by President-Elect Obama’s equally eloquent silence and inaction regarding the sexism and misogyny directed at Senator Clinton and her supporters, particularly the sophomoric expression of these attitudes by Jon Favreau, the man writing President-elect Obama’s inaugural address. (I shudder to think what the reaction of the Cohen family would have been if Favreau had been found on YouTube horsing around calling somebody a “homo” – maybe then Richard Cohen’s sister would join us in our demand that the President-Elect fire this sophomoric bigot as his chief speech-writer. Whether a bigot is slick (Warren) or juvenile (Favreau), he is still a bigot.)

It is tempting to forget in this sort of dynamic who the real problem is. As is clear from what I have written so far, I wish Richard Cohen and his sister would be, respectively, writing about and canceling inauguration parties as much over Mr. Obama’s inaction in the face of sexism and misogyny as they are in the face of anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. And yes, I wish that Richard Cohen’s sister had paid attention to and given greater weight to the fact that she had the option to work to elect somebody who, both as a Senator and as a Presidential candidate, repeatedly marched in Pride parades and met with editors of gay newspapers across the country rather than working for somebody who would not even have his photograph taken with Gavin Newsome.

But I am not falling into the trap that lies that way. Just because people got it wrong before does not mean they cannot help matters now. People can learn. So despite the bit of complaining above, I am not going to point a finger at Richard Cohen’s sister (or, for that matter, at Katha Pollitt for decrying the misogyny involved in the Warren choice when Pollitt, like Richard Cohen’s sister, opted to support Mr. Obama for the presidency when it was already obvious that he was complacent, to say the least, about sexism and misogyny). I am just pleased that they are starting to pay attention now and apparently coming to understand better who they voted for. To quote Richard Cohen: “The real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama’s inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something.”

Aye, there’s the rub. During the primary season and the general election a friend of mine who spent some considerable amount of time listening to me lament the Democratic Party’s poor judgment in making then-Senator Obama their poster-child, kept saying to me that the real problem with Mr. Obama is that he is an “empty suit”.

That term seemed to me too tepid back then. But I have come to see it as the essential problem behind the problem of Mr. Obama’s inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader, and possibly any kind of leader. To be a moral leader, to stand for something means that you have to fill out your suit, your office, your position. To be an “empty suit” is to be a person who cannot draw a line in the sand, precisely because you do not have an arm and hand within that suit to use to reach out and draw that line. To be an “empty suit” is to be devoid of the weightiness that real leadership requires, including the gravitas to admit to a mistake and change one’s position (drop the bigoted minister and lose the bigoted speechwriter; say you have been wrong to dig in your heels rather than listen to the concerns of so many of the people who worked so hard to elect you). To be an “empty suit” is to be a moral vacuum.

I refused to vote for John McCain for a number of reasons but among them was the fact that while I knew he had the capacity for moral leadership, I did not care for the directions toward which his moral commitments would lead my country. I refused to vote for Barack Obama because I knew he came up empty on the capacity for moral leadership.

In some ways, moral emptiness, especially in a President, is worse than moral wrong-headedness. The morally wrong-headed leader takes a stand, e.g. George W. Bush’s legitimization of torture, and one can rally people against the stand she or he takes. The morally empty leader takes no stand. Under these circumstances, her or his silences often allow people to forget that the blank that exists in lieu of a leader is the appropriate target of criticism. After all, it seems easier to go after people who actually do take stands (Rick Warren, for example) rather than the person who silently enables wrong-headed person to gain in stature. But this is sleight of hand. The real problem is the enabler, the person who allows the sophomoric sexist to put words in his mouth, the person who lets bigoted clerics and their churches affiliate with him.

So, to Richard Cohen’s sister and to Katha Pollitt, I say welcome to my party – the one that got lost in 2008, the one that expected moral leadership of a certain kind from a Democratic president. Now that you are here, I hope you can help me figure out what we are going to do with the empty suit about to occupy the Oval Office. If that empty suit thinks he can pick up sufficient evangelical money and votes in 2012, he is not going to listen to bloggers and op-ed columnists whose votes and followers he thinks he can replace with the support of the evangelicals, regardless of the detestable content of many of their views and some of their conduct. Personally, I do not think we can give the empty suit the sort of backbone necessary to resist the lure of that support. If we cannot give this empty suit some backbone, we need, as I have written before, to start figuring out how we can have a better candidate on offer in 2012. So to the people who are canceling their celebrations, may I suggest that they use the time and effort saved to start solving that problem. We need to coalesce now around somebody who can fight for a nomination by a major Party – probably the the Party formerly recognizable as the Democratic one – who is what Obama’s supporters hoped he would be and what I fear he is not.

Prairie Fire, published in 1974, is described as Ayers’ communist manifesto.

Dedicating a book to Sirhan Sirhan isn’t radical chic or a youthful indulgence. Dedicating a book to Sirhan Sirhan is tantamount to denying the Holocaust, embracing the screeds of the Aryan Brotherhood, and joining the ranks of those whose celebrated the attacks against America on 9/11.

Equating Sirhan Sirhan with Harriet Tubman and John Brown is stupidity. Bobby Kennedy worked on behalf of the poor and the unrepresented; Sirhan is a killer.

Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian sympathizer who murdered Bobby Kennedy because of Kennedy’s pro-Israel position. On the 40th anniversary of the assassination, ABC News reported:

Sirhan claimed he killed Kennedy because he was angry over Kennedy’s support for Israel. Sirhan was born in Jerusalem to Arab Christian parents who had moved to America when Sirhan was 12. The assassination occurred on the first anniversary of the Six Day War in which Israel had humiliated the combined armies of its Arab neighbors.

Yet another red flag about Obama, and this one should send alarms to the Jewish supporters of Obama.

Obama and Ayers, friends and collaborators; Obama endorsed Ayers’ book, Ayers dedicated his book to Sirhan Sirhan, an anti-Israeli terrorist and murderer of Bobby Kennedy.

Rashid Khalidi: Obama’s friend, anti-Israeli pro-PLO activist. The LA Times allegedly has a video of a dinner party in which Obama is toasting Khalidi, with Bill Ayers in attendance.

Sirhan Sirhan, Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Barack Obama

Obama has surrounded himself with violent and hateful anti-American activists, and he lies about that fact. Obama knows Ayers is a liability, but he also knows that he can’t alienate the anti-American Left. Larry Johnson writes:

As we have noted repeatedly at NoQuarter, Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers probably started when Barack was at Columbia University in the late 1980s. That’s why Bill Ayers then turns to Barack Obama and gets him named to head the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers established. That’s why Barack felt so comfortable kicking off his political campaign for the State legislature in Bill Ayers’ living room.

Obama’s friend dedicated his book to the murderer of Bobby Kennedy, his preacher claimed 9/11 was God’s retribution, Obama told Rick Warren that the U.S. could be evil, Ayers bombed the Pentagon, Pfleger said that Hillary Clinton believed she had “white entitlement,” Obama called his ailing grandmother a “typical white person,” and Wright said the U.S had manufactured AIDS to kill African Americans.

The Democratic Party has been infected by an alliance of radical demagogues, the corrupt Chicago machine and the anti-American Left.

Bobby Kennedy:

After funeral services in New York, RFK’s funeral train carried his body to Washington where he was to be buried near his brother. Along the way, on both sides of tracks, Americans of every color and background saluted this great man who brought the disenfranchised together.

See also American Girl in Italy’s post

Medusa contributed to this post.

It’s clear to many Democrats that a radical clique has taken control of the Party. Democratic ideals once held to be sacrosanct, including freedom of speech, one person one vote, and an intolerance of sexism have been violently pushed aside for the benefit of Obama. The media drumbeat for Obama is incessant; the media has even stopped pretending to be neutral. We’re seeing the country through Alice’s Looking Glass now and everything is upside-down and backwards. In an effort to save our Party and country, many Democrats are actively working to defeat Obama.

In 1980, the last Japanese soldier of World War Two, Captain Fumio Nakahira, was discovered on Mt. Halcon, Mindoro Island, Philippines. During the previous 35 years, Captain Nakahira had survived alone, serving his Emperor and believing that the War had not yet ended. (This was 15 years after the Gilligan’s Island episode).

Captain Nakahira comes to mind when I think about the thousands of disaffected and disillusioned Democrats across the country who will not be voting for Obama. If Obama is elected despite our efforts to defeat him, it will codify for a generation the Chicago corruption, race-baiting, and misogyny practiced by Obama and his minions; tactics which caused many of to leave the Party. And Obama’s race-baiting, misogynistic thugs will say: Good riddance!

Camping out on our own private Mt. Halcons, many thousands of men and women will remain committed to the causes which brought us to the Democratic Party in the first place. We won’t stop being concerned about sexism, race relations, economic opportunity, and national security.

It’s now dawning on Republicans and independents that a creeping totalitarianism is sweeping the country. Obama’s Truth Squads use the power of the state to stifle free expression, McCain supporters are jeered in public, and Obama’s shock troops — in a form of hate speech so ugly that it can only be described as a pogrom against women — wear clothing which declares that the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, is a “cunt.” Sexual terrorism is the new form of Left-wing Kristallnacht.

Where did this come from?

The ecstatic mania of Obama’s supporters comes from many places, and I don’t pretend to understand all of the sources. Many who support Obama are low-information liberals, do-good progressives, proud African Americans, and fed-up independents. I can’t blame these groups; the Bush Administration has been a disaster. There is, however, a core group of Obama supporters who believe that the Senator from Illinois will bring revolutionary change. And their desire for the revolution is all-consuming and any tactic is considered fair game: caucus fraud, sexism, race-baiting, voter intimidation, online smear campaigns, sexual terrorism, and voter fraud. Anything to win.

I hold Obama accountable for the tone of this campaign and the actions of his supporters. From “hoodwink and bamboozled” to his “lipstick on a pig,” Obama’s sexist double-speak and race-baiting innuendos have unleashed something very ugly into the ether. Obama has given his supporters the tacit encouragement to cross lines of acceptable discourse in order to destroy his political opponents. In the Obama world, Bill Clinton is a racist, Hillary is a bitch, Sarah Palin is a cunt, and John McCain is erratic and senile. I fully expect that an Obama Administration, like all recent Administrations, will continue in campaign mode and I expect these tactics to continue. This was the reason, to borrow a phrase, that we sought to fumigate our Party.

Like many of you, I won’t have anything to do with Obama or his party. Obama’s tactics go against the reason I was a Democrat and no pleas and no threats will force me to give up my principles. Above my computer I have postcards with the images of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy; my Hillary poster is in the corner and remains unframed.

The recent, reluctantly released papers from Obama’s time as head at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) and his time on the board of the Woods Fund sheds new light on his relationship with Bill Ayers and the seamy milieu of Farrakhan’s Chicago.

The CAC and Woods Fund money paved the way for Obama’s political career:

the monies doled out through the Woods Fund to these groups, including [Bill] Ayers own Annenberg Challenge, helped cement Obama’s political relationships and bond with key players in Chicago.

Stanley Kurtz said that CAC money did not go directly to schools:

“Instead of giving money directly to schools, they gave to what they called external partners, and these external partners were often pretty radical community organizer groups.”

And Steve Diamond writes that Ayers was focused on what:

Ayers calls “social justice” approaches to teaching and “small schools” as well as race-based approaches to curriculum in the public schools.

Ayers and Obama funneled money intended for education to race-based curriculum. Matthew Weaver reports:

let’s also not forget organizations that received funding from Barack and Bill [Ayers], such as:

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Arab American Action Network (AAAN) founded by husband and wife Rashid and Mona Khalidi. Maoist Mike Klonsky, another terrorist member of the Weatherman Children and Family Justice Center, Bernardine’s organization. Trinity Unity Church and Rev. Wright.

Ayers is an important part of the Chicago racial Left, a loosely affiliated group of churches, academics, and activists who include Jeremiah Wright, Pfleger, Farrakhan, the group ACORN, and many others. The racial Left is not committed to fighting racism — a noble cause — but instead looking at the world through a racial lens. This means that issues of class — which affects whites, women, gays, etc. — is frequently dismissed. Instead, there are disquisitions on “white privilege,” without discussing the fact that poverty knows no color. The racial Left, of course, is a class struggle between those who have and those who do not, and many of it’s proponents have attended the best schools and hold the highest positions in the academy and in government. It’s no accident that Bill Ayers, the scion of a wealthy family, is a primary member of the racial Left. And it’s no accident that Obama, surrounded by millionaires in San Francisco, pointed out that his difficulties in Pennsylvania were due to skin color (identifying those resistant to him as white) and then ridiculing them as religious, intolerant of immigrants, and as the owners of guns, all cultural indicators to the racial Left of the despised lower-income whites. He could just have easily said those who are bitter cling to Jeff Foxworthy, shop at Wal-Mart, and hump their sister, or any other stereotype used against low-income whites.

The racial Left is about protecting status:

Not only is Ayers using Obama’s rapid ascent to celebrity in order to capitalize on his own unquenchable thirst for fame by having his memoir Fugitive Days reissued in January 2009, he is also working with Hollywood to have his memoir turned into a movie. As if that’s not enough, he and his wife, Bernardine Dorhn, have authored a book, soon to be released, entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy.

Belying it’s title, this book is NOT about white supremacists, such as the Aryan Brotherhood, but instead states that “white supremacy is the dominant political system” in American’. From Amazon’s Product Description:

Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors’ own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

Stanley Kurtz has uncovered that Obama attended Farrakhan’s Million Man March, and Obama’s close friend, Michael Pfleger, is close to Farrakhan:

Although it’s been discussed before (because it confirms that Obama attended Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March), a 1995 background piece on Obama from the Chicago Reader has received far too little attention. Careful consideration of this important profile makes it clear that Obama’s long-standing ties to Chicago’s most rabidly radical preachers call into question far more than Obama’s judgment and character (although they certainly do that, as well). Obama’s two-decades at Trinity open a critically important window onto his radical-left political leanings. No mere change of church membership can erase that truth.

As Matthew Weaver posted, Rev. Farrakhan just pronounced Obama the Messiah (watch the video here):

“You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.” – Louis Farrakhan

In addition to being the leader of NOI, Farrakhan is first and foremost a politician, and one of the most powerful in Chicago. And Obama has at least one NOI member on his payroll.

In a June article from Reuters entitled “BREAKING NEWS: Nation of Islam Activists on Obama Camp Payroll” states that

“Sen. Barack Obama employed and continues to employ senior staffers who belong to the Nation of Islam, and the presidential candidate has some “worrying” ties to the controversial group headed by Louis Farrakhan, a former key Obama insider told AARON KLEIN… The former insider confirmed Obama is directly aware of the Nation of Islam members on his staff.”

“A key constituency for Obama was Hyde Park, where Farrakhan lives. To be successful politically in that area, you need to be involved with Farrakhan, since he’s a strong power in the district,” said the former insider.”

“The former insider identified former Obama worker Shakir Muhammad as a Nation of Islam activist. Muhammad was paid by Obama’s office as a photographer…According to a black supremacist source tied to Farrakhan, Muhammad previously worked as a bodyguard for the Nation of Islam chief.”

In fact, according to the article, Cynthia K. Miller, a known Nation of Islam activist who served Obama in his early state Senate days and was treasurer for his U.S. senatorial campaign, and a paid consultant in 2003 and 2004, was the beneficiary of help from Obama by another one of his Chicago friends, Tony Rezko.

“The former insider said Obama asked indicted Chicago businessman and Obama financier Tony Rezko to get his treasurer, Miller, a state government job with
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.”

While researching the source of Michelle Obama’s alleged “whitey” rant, we discovered direct connections between the Nation of Islam (NOI), Stokely Carmichael, Jeremiah Wright’s Black Liberation Theology and, most prominently, Louis Farrakhan.

According to Larry Johnson’s sources, the Michelle Obama tape captures her in sordid company:

The sources who have seen the tape report that Michelle says
disparaging things about “whites” and that Louis Farrakhan is visible.
There is no identifying information on the segment they have seen to
identify the location or time when this was recorded. [emphasis added]

Those who are following this matter will recall that Michelle Obama, when asked about these allegations, is reported to have said that “whitey” is not a word used by African Americans today. However, we documented that Mrs. Obama’s primary text for her Princeton thesis was Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, and we showed how Carmichael used the term “whitey” repeatedly, thereby establishing an epistemological connection between Carmichael and Mrs. Obama. In other words, Michelle Obama is the intellectual offspring of Stokely Carmichael.

Before going further, it should be noted that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was once a member of the Nation of Islam, though it’s not clear when he was involved with NOI. Ryan Lizza of the New Republic first reported that:

Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had
studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”[Emphasis added]

But back to Stokely Carmichael. Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigations has released hundreds of pages from their files on Stokely Carmichael. It’s a treasure trove for those interested in the history of the civil rights movement. What we found most interesting, however, were the large number of documents connecting Carmichael with the NOI. For instance, the document below is an Airtel sent to Director Hoover on July 29, 1966, from Chicago. The subject is Stokely Carmichael and it concerns NOI leader Elijah Muhammed’s “CALL FOR SUMMIT MEETING, MAJOR CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS.”

There are three areas of interest for us: first, the Airtel came from the city of Chicago; second, the year 1966 (more on that later), and third, that the Nation of Islam — in the manner of the infamous mob meeting in Apalachin in 1957 — was organizing all of the major civil rights groups.

It has been widely reported, and documented here, that Carmichael was an “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party, and that he was the leader of the innocuous sounding Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The following document, however, shows that Carmichael was open to violence as a political tool–see the highlighted sentence below–”This nonviolence bit is just a philanthropic hang-up,” and that he was indeed a founder of the Black Panther Party:

In the following document we initially noticed Carmichael’s willingness to use violence. He is paraphrased as saying that “in his opinion, the black man is justified in using any means at his command to obtain what he believes is due him,” indicating an acceptance of violence as seen through a racial frame. What’s more interesting, however, is the next paragraph. “Louis Walcott, Minister of the New York City Muslim Mosque, Nation of Islam, also participated in this conference.” See the second paragraph below:

The name Louis, of course, was glaring. Could it be he? A quick Google search linked to a 1996 Morning Edition transcription of a Bob Edwards piece on Farrakhan:

The early life of Louis Farrakhan, who grew up as Louis Eugene Walcott, was heavily influenced by his loving but demanding mother and his poor but safe neighborhood of Roxbury, Boston, in the late 1940s.

Over the last decade, Louis Farrakhan has emerged as one of the most visible and formidable black political leaders in America

Let’s add up what we have so far: Stokely Carmichael, Michelle Obama’s primary source and intellectual ancestor, shared the stage with Louis Farrakhan, the same man who she allegedly shared a stage with when she said “whitey.”

Carmichael and Farrakhan may have shared more than a stage. The document below indicates but doesn’t conclude that Carmichael may have been a Muslim himself. Although heavily redacted, the FBI’s source said that “Stokely Carmichael, [redacted] as ‘one of us’ which this source interpreted as meaning a member of the Muslims.”

Whether or not Carmichael was a Muslim is unclear. What is clear is that at sometime in the summer of 1966 there was a meeting of the minds between some civil rights groups, black radicals, and the Nation of Islam. These groups organized into a force promoting and preaching a racist form of black nationalism. The document below describes a meeting that clearly shows this union of forces: Carmichael and Minister Louis “made it clear they wanted to unite with all Negro groups regardless of philosophy.” Note the date of August 18, 1966:

This takes us back to Jeremiah Wright and the question of when Wright was a Muslim. According to Wright’s Wikipedia entry:

In 1963, after two years of service, Wright joined the United States Navy and entered the Corpsman School at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Wright was then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“In 1966, as a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman,” the Wikipeida entry continues, Wright assisted with the care of President Johnson. Extrapolating from these dates, it appears that Wright was in Maryland between 1964 and 1966, and this may have been the time when he was a member of NOI. Wright didn’t start at Trinity until 1972, and evidently received spiritual training after receiving a master’s degree in English in 1969.

Also in Maryland in 1964 was Stokely Carmichael, where he was arrested “as a result of demonstrations in that city.” This doesn’t mean that Wright knew Carmichael, but surely Wright was cognizant of Carmichael’s work and of NOI as well. This is likely the time when he was a “Muslim and black nationalist.”

However Wright was radicalized, it is clear that he consciously appropriated the language and tenor of the Nation of Islam.

Wright’s statement that 9/11 was deserved retribution (“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans…America’s chickens are coming home to roost”) is a perfect echo of Malcolm X’s statement that “The assassination of Kennedy is a result of that way of life and thinking. The chickens came home to roost.”

Although it appears that Wright began his focus on Black Liberation Theology sometime after 1966, his racial attitudes and rhetoric have imitated that of NOI since at least 1970. Wright’s blaming the United States for creating AIDS to kill minorities is but just one example of his thinking being in lockstep with NOI.

Black Liberation Theology was first formed in 1966. According to NPR:

Black liberation theology originated on July 31, 1966, when 51 black pastors bought a full page ad in the New York Times and demanded a more aggressive approach to eradicating racism. They echoed the demands of the black power movement, but the new crusade found its source of inspiration in the Bible.

Keep in mind that NOI’s Elijah Mohammad called for a summit of black leaders on July 11, 1966, only 20 days prior to the official formation of Black Liberation Theology. If the dates don’t convince you of a synergy between NOI and Black Liberation Theology, please note Wright’s mentor — and Black Liberation Theology founder — James Cone’s words about NOI’s Malcolm X:

Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’ The false Christianity of the white-devil oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed.

The black intellectual’s goal, says Cone, is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.”

Couple these words with Wright’s own view that:

There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: ‘How can we become black?’

In 1998, Louis A. De-Caro, Jr. published a book titled Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity. De-Caro’s book underscores the racial nature and revolutionary intent of the NOI’s promotion of a black “Christianity”:

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam based their religious orthodoxy more on the Bible than on the Qur’an. In part, this was because they sought to convert black Christians. More- over, Elijah Muhammad taught that the Bible, actually the story of “dark people,” had been distorted by the white man in order to enslave and oppress black people in the United States.

The Nation of Islam and Black Liberation Theology are two doors to the same room. Black Liberation Theology is a “palatable” form of “Christian” black nationalism. The fiery anti-American, race-baiting words of Wright, Ayers, Meeks, Pfleger, and Moss are from the same philosophical cauldron as the Nation of Islam. It’s obvious now why Wright’s Trumpet Magazine featured Farrakhan on the cover:

Some have said that Michelle Obama’s thesis proves nothing because it was written more than 20 years ago. We suggest that it was no accident that the Obamas sought out Wright a mere 2-3 years after she wrote her thesis and stayed with him for nearly 20 years, even while he preached the vilest and most hateful sermons that our nation has been forced to hear. TexasDarlin writes:

It’s no wonder that the Obamas joined Trinity United, grew close to Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, and actively defended the church. And there is no doubt in this alert reader’s mind that Michelle Obama clung to Trinity as long as possible politically and, unfortunately for her husband, perhaps many years too long for most voters’ palates.

But the Obamas’ connections to the Nation of Islam go deeper than Rev. Wright. Louis Farrakhan’s political connections extend to the Obamas directly through Chicago politics and Tony Rezko. Larry Johnson writes that:

Before Barack came on the scene, THE MAN in his political district was Louis Farrakhan. No one could take Alice Palmer’s seat without Farrakhan’s blessing. No one. I do not fault Barack Obama for seeking out the blessing of Farrakhan, but the story of what was done behind the scenes to get rid of Barack’s predecessor—Alice Palmer—has not been told. A knowledgeable source tells me that Tony Rezko played a direct role in this feat. And Rezko has been tight with Farrakhan.

At some point, probably between 1964-66, Jeremiah Wright was a member of the Nation of Islam and was indoctrinated into its odious brand of racist theology. And make no mistake, Wright’s race-baiting is not indicative of the vast majority of black churches. A pastor at LivePrayer writes:

Please hear me very clear. Black liberation theology is a perverse view of the Scriptures and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a radical view held by a very small minority of black pastors. This is NOT representative of the black church or the overwhelming majority of black pastors who preach and teach the true Gospel of Jesus Christ without looking at it thru the lens of color. Every black pastor I know condemns Dr. Wright and this perverse racist theology.

In 1966, a group of “Christian” ministers, at the behest of Elijah Mohammad, began to preach the same teachings as NOI. Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan actively worked to bridge the gap between these two groups, and Carmichael would soon publish a book espousing much the same separatist ideas. Carmichael’s book “guided” Michelle Obama’s thesis and soon she and Barack would join Trinity United Church of Christ.

The continuity of the teachings of Carmichael, Farrakhan, Cone, Pfleger, Wright, and Ayers is incontrovertible; it’s all about skin color.

Christopher Hitchens asks:

how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

Obama’s targeted use of Malcolm X’s super-charged racial code words (”hoodwink, bamboozled”), and his followers’ continuous charges of racism against Obama’s opponents as a political tool has been well documented. It shows that Obama has a studied understanding of the racial radicalism of Malcolm X, Farrakhan, Wright, Pfleger, and Ayers coupled with the cold-blooded instincts of a heartless politician. The Obama campaign has already smeared as racists vast swaths of the Democratic Party, people who were drawn to the Party for its commitment to civil rights. Now he employs the same tactics against John McCain, a champion of immigrants who has never had a hint of racism associated with his name.

Sinclair Lewis is frequently quoted as saying: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

In today’s upside down world, racism has come to America embodied in a multi-racial politician and carrying the banner of the Democratic Party.

So as I listened to Michelle Obama introduce her husband at the DNC, I wondered why she didn’t include his educational achievements. Since the multi-racial Obama poses as an African American (although he is not descended from slaves and his family never suffered under Jim Crow), and uses the “self-made man” mythology to sell himself–raised by a single mother, fed on food stamps, etc–you would think that graduating from Columbia and going to Harvard Law would be hawked in detail. We have heard that he was the first African American to become president of the Harvard Law Review, only to learn it was a political move by Harvard during a time of racial tensions on campus.

Moreover, Obama appears to have never actually written anything. That’s sort of like becoming the head chef of a fancy restaurant but never cooking.

In fact, Obama’s educational history has been intentionally omitted throughout his political primetime. When asked about his undergraduate training at Columbia University, The New Times states that Obama “declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.” Why would that be?

What we know is that Obama graduated from a Hawaiian prep school with a B- GPA. He then went to Occidental College, about which we know little to nothing, and then to Columbia University. According to conservative journalist, Jack Cashill:

We know enough about Obama’s Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.

So how did Obama get into Harvard Law School five years after graduating from Columbia? if his LSAT scores had been something to brag about, you know he would be bragging.

Connections are everything, as the saying goes, and that is nowhere more true than in academia. During his time at Columbia, Obama made two very important connections: Bill Ayers and Edward Said. Cashill reports:

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama’s reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Edward Said (pronounced Sayeed)

Edward Said became famous for his critique of American attitudes toward eastern cultures, particularly Islamist Arabs. His scholarship contributed to the concept of “the other,” a useful way of understanding prejudices and biases The idea that some people discriminate against others whose beliefs, skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc, differs from their own is helpful in understanding and correcting discrimination and in teaching our children to be open minded.

However, this theory is now put into service by the so-called “progressives,” who use it to ridicule people who differ from them: Clinton Democrats, Republicans and certain strata of Americans. Rooted in anthropology and literary theory’s appropriation of Marxism, the postcolonial theory of Said et al is at the root of Obama’s distain for the “bitter” working class Americans who cling to their guns and their religions.

It is of course ironic that the educated latte drinking members of the so-called “Whole Foods Nation” find “others” inferior to themselves. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes:

What [educated people] worry about is provincialism — the danger that our perceptions will be dulled, our intellects constricted, and our sympathies narrowed by…acceptance of our own society.

Provincialism is not a compliment. It means unsophisticated and “country”–as in country-and-western, backward, rural, redneck, hick, shitkicker and so on. Said taught that Americans were biased against Arabs, but the American students who studied with him use this theory as justification to be biased against America.

Obama studied with Said at Columbia. Said was a Palestinian by birth and a pro-Palestinian activist in life. He said that he was a “Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture.” Said’s essay, Between Worlds, reveals an even greater connection between student, Obama, and professor, Said:

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.

Barack Obama breaking bread with Edward Said

No Quarter has many excellent posts on radical Bill Ayers and his long relationship with Barack Obama. And to complete this three-way embrace, Edward Said wrote a back-cover endorsement on Bill Ayers’ 2001 Fugitive Days. Said reveals how close they are, at least ideologically, when he wrote:

“For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in, this book is essential, indeed necessary reading.”

Khalid al-Mansour

Donald Warden (aka Khalid Al Monsour), founded the Berkeley based African-American Association (AAA) and became the mentor of Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers are said have broken from Warden’s AAA group due to disagreements about economics. According the UC Berkeley’s chronology of the Black Panthers:

(1961) Huey Newton, a black militant activist student, meets Bobby Seale while attending Merritt College (Oakland, California). Both join the Afro-American Association, a black cultural organization led by Donald Warden.”

(1965) Huey Newton’s mentor, Donald Warden, creates Economic Night in a storefront located next door to the future Black Panther Party office on Grove Street, Oakland.

Larry wrote this piece on Khalid al-Mansour, the person who helped Obama get into Harvard. Al-Mansour is a Texas-born African American whose birth name was Donald Warden. Among other things, he is known by some for his rabid anti-Semitism (see this video). And Cashill adds this:

As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama’s behalf.

An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

Percy Sutton, a Manhattan Borough president for 12 years was among the most powerful black politicians in New York. In the YouTube below (previously posted by Larry, but please watch it again), Sutton describes how al-Mansour introduced him to Barack Obama, asking him to help get Obama into Harvard.

Cashill writes:

“I was introduced to [Obama] by a friend,” Sutton told the interviewer. Sutton named the friend as “Dr. Khalid al-Mansour.” Sutton described al-Mansour as “the principal adviser to one of the world’s richest men.” The billionaire in question is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

Knowing that Sutton had friends at Harvard, al-Mansour asked Sutton to “please write a letter in support of [Obama] … a young man that has applied to Harvard.”

So who is this Dr. Khalid al-Mansour? A quick Google search finds this biography from African Venture Partners:

Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tario Al-Mansour is an internationally acknowledged advisor to Heads of State and business leaders in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America. He has been actively involved in structuring investments and joint ventures worldwide for over 35 years. Dr. Al-Mansour was also responsible for the Africa investment activities of Kingdom Holdings, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal’s investment company. During his distinguished career, Dr. Al-Mansour has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University, Bombay University, Columbia University, UCLA, University of Kenya, London School of Economics and the University of Ghana.
In addition to Africa Venture Partners, Dr. Al-Mansour sits on the Boards of: Saudi African Bank; Kingdom Holdings, Africa; Multimedia Super Corridor (Malaysia); Space Tech Inc.; AmNet Corp. International; New Avenues Fund Ltd; United Bank for Africa; United Networks; and Landmark Entertainment.

Dr. Al-Mansour has authored 24 books and is listed in Who’s Who in the World; International Who’s Who in the Arab World; Two Thousand Men of Achievement; Royal Blue Book of London; World’s Who’s Who of Intellectuals and American Hall of Fame.

Dr. Khalid Al-Mansour has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University (Phi Beta Kappa) and Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of California at Berkeley.

In a fascinating academic article entitled The US Organization, Black Power Vanguard Politics, and the United Front Ideal: Los Angeles and Beyond, Scot Brown discusses the history of various Black nationalists groups. He states this pertinent information about Donald Warden/Khalid al-Mansour:

IN 1963, KARENGA met with Donald Warden, a bay area nationalist who headed the Afro-American Association. Bay Area activists Ernie Allen, Jr. (Ernie Mkalimoto), Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Ken Freeman were also members of this group. Karenga accepted Warden’s invitation to head the Los Angeles chapter of the group. Ayuko Babu, Tut Hayes, Akida Kimani, and Lloyd Hawkins figured prominently in the association’s Los Angeles chapter. The association functioned primarily as a study group and lecture forum — members frequently spoke outdoors to black community audiences (sometimes called “street speaking”).

DONALD WARDEN RECORDED his association’s street-speaking style in an album called Burn Baby, Burn, released in the aftermath of the Watts explosion. An instrumental track and chorus-like affirming voices that call and respond to his assertions, accentuate this recording’s non-stop nationalist proselytizing.

For those of us who remember the Watts riots of 1965, the phrase “Burn Baby, Burn” has very specific associations of molotov cocktails, bloody street fights, “race” riots and death.

What does it take to get into Harvard Law School?

Khalid al-Mansour (aka Donald Warden) asked his friend, Percy Sutton, to help Obama get into Harvard. With friends like al-Mansour, who needs good grades, high scores or affirmative action?

The relationship between Obama and al-Mansour deserves further research.

We have written in detail about the Obamas’ associations with other Black nationalists, and this information about Khalid al-Mansour adds yet another layer to the story.

Check out other related No Quarter reports:

Black Liberation Theology

Obama the Stealth Socialist

What Lies Beneath Barack Obama

Wheel…of…Theology

He almost wrecked Barack Obama’s presidential dreams, and now firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright has helped destroy a Dallas church worker’s marriage – and her job, The Post has learned.

You’ve seen the disgusting video of Reverend Wright, in a Sunday sermon, doing the the “hump” to suggest that Bill Clinton “done us wrong”:

The background story to Wright’s second marriage calls into serious question Wright’s “right” to preach to anyone. Here’s more from the Post:

Wright has been married to his second wife, Ramah, for more than 20 years.

The preacher reportedly wooed Ramah away from her first husband in the 1980s, when the couple came to marriage counseling at Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Now let’s see more reminders of Obama’s Reverend Wright. Remember this “America’s Chickens Come Home to Roost”?

The 37-year-old Elizabeth Payne admits to the affair but gives few other details.

Elizabeth Payne, 37, said she had a steamy sexual affair with the controversial, racially divisive man of the cloth while she was an executive assistant at a church headed by a popular Wright protégé.

She has since basically been excommunicated from the church, fired from her paid position in the church, and divorced. Her husband dashed to divorce court after the affair was discovered. She did have this to say about her life post-Wright:

Elizabeth Payne said she has been banished by Haynes and the flock at Friendship-West.

“I’m not a member of the congregation anymore; I’m not even allowed on the premises,” she said.

And she had this to say about her affair with Wright, her job and divorce:

“I was involved with Rev. Wright, and that’s why I lost my job and why my husband divorced me,” Payne said.

She refused to reveal when the adulterous affair started or how she met Wright.

But fellow churchgoers at Friendship-West “found out about the affair in the spring,” Payne said.

At the time, she was secretary to the Rev. Frederick Haynes III, a longtime Wright disciple.

In April, Payne organized a series of Texas public appearances by Wright, 67. Weeks before, Obama had disavowed his preacher of 20 years after Wright’s anti-government rants came to light.

“Liz was by Rev. Wright’s side day and night during those days,” a church source said.

“It’s all true,” said Payne, adding that she has filed a wrongful-dismissal claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to get her job back.

In an interesting twist, Wright gave a sermon about trouble in relationships at a church in New Jersey. Here is more on that:

“There’s no such thing as a problem-free relationship,” he told a packed Elmwood United Presbyterian Church. “In life, you’ll have unexpected problems.”

Here are his words minus a controversial statement.

Payne’s husband, Fred Payne, 64, said he learned of the affair in late February, when he discovered e-mails between his wife and Wright.

“There must have been about 80 of them, back and forth,” he said. “Wright said things like he was going to leave his wife for Elizabeth.”

And now we need to be reminded of Obama on his spiritual mentor….

And we know that Reverend Wright/Wrong became a albatross around Obama’s neck. Obama did what he always has — he denied any knowledge of the sermons — the same way he denies responsibility for anything his campaign does!

And this is the man we want leading our country? Not!

Obama your “chickens have come home to roost!”

Two major elements of the developing meme that John McCain did not sufficiently vet presumptive vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin are highly suspect. Each contention is not provable, and there is strong reason to believe that each is almost completely, if not totally, untrue.

The first assertion is that McCain’s people did little if any vetting of Palin until a few days ago. The second is that McCain’s team has never looked at years of archived articles at Palin’s hometown paper.

Wizbang Blog reported on May 29 that a McCain advance man named Arthur Culvahouse was in Juneau, Alaska. Even three months ago, Wizbang Blog’s Kevin
already sensed the power of Palin being on McCain’s ticket:

Governor Palin would (in my estimation) make an excellent VP candidate for McCain. Thomas Cheplick at The American Spectator makes the case that she’s probably the only VP candidate who can balance the ticket against Obama. She’s also a potential magnet for disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, many of whom are just looking for a reason not to vote for Obama.

If conservative blogs were weighing the benefits of Palin months ago, one can be fairly certain that McCain’s lieutenants were vetting Alaska’s governor and conducting focus groups and polls on every conceivable angle of her selection.

On the Democratic side, however, any criticism of Obama was quickly shut down by the media. For example, David Sirota defended Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racial sermons and implied that Hillary was engaged in racial politics by bringing up Wright. Sirota wrote during the primaries: “Does the very reaction to Wright show he’s right about racism? Clinton seems to think so,” sniffed an indignant Sirota on the notion that Hillary would use Wright against Obama.

The hysterical reaction during the primaries to any criticism of Obama with accusations of racism has created a situation where an unvetted Obama faces the Republican Blitzkreig.

Below is a limited list of areas where the media has failed to investigate Obama. This list does not include Obama’s many policy reversals or outright fabrications, like the statement that the Kennedy family facilitated his father coming to the United States. It does not include Obama’s habit of voting ‘present’ as a member of the Illinois State Senate nor his strange maneuverings regarding a born alive bill. Instead, the list below concerns Obama’s associates and business dealings. It is a sordid group, comprised of the America-hating, anti-Israel, and explicitly racial Left. There is big money involved, as with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and bizarre organizations to which money was funneled. Obama’s milieu is the intersection of Chicago politics and the fringe Left; there is much to be explored and explained about Obama. Below is a partial list where Obama remains unvetted:

1. Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama’s 20-year membership in an explicitly racist church, a church with rhetoric too hot for Oprah.
2. Rezko. Obama’s ties to Tony Rezko and the 2005 purchase of the Obamas’ home. Obama funnelling money to Rezko’s sleazy businesses.
3. Ayers. Obama’s extensive ties to unrepentant terroist Bill Ayers.
4. Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). Obama and Ayers together dispensing tens of millions of dollars supposedly for educational organizations. Although now just being investigated, it’s known that money was funnelled to Ayers’ friend, radical Mike Klonsky, a founding member of the Maoist Party of the United States.
5. Minister Louis Farrakhan. Obama is surrounded by people like Rev. Willie Barrow, a friend and admirer of the anti-white, anti-Semitic Farrakhan.

If the media doesn’t do their job, we can rest assured that the Republicans will happily do it for them.

A group of House Republicans charged today that Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic Presidential nominee, had appointed three ”anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian” members to the party’s ruling body and challenged him to dismiss them.Representative Norman F. Lent, Republican of Nassau, said the three members were appointed to the 400-member Democratic National Committee after the party’s convention last July in Atlanta as a gesture of conciliation to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the defeated Presidential contender.Mr. Lent identified the three as the Rev. Willie Barrow, executive director of Mr. Jackson’s Chicago-based Operation PUSH; Robert Farrell, a Los Angeles City Councilman and close Jackson associate, and Ruth Ann Skaff of Houston, whom he said was a spokeswoman for the pro-Palestinian Ad Hoc Committtee on Lebanon.Mr. Lent said that Mrs. Barrow and Mr. Farrell were supporters of the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, a radical Muslim leader who has made anti-Semitic statements. He said Ms. Skaff had led anti-Israel demonstrations. 

Barrow’s fondness for Farrakhan — a man who describes Jews as Satanic — is best summoned up in this quote:

Mrs. Barrow was quoted in a 1985 article in The Washington Post as saying, ”I love my brother, Minister Louis Farrakhan. The devil don’t like it, Chicago don’t like it, the world don’t like it, but we love it.” 

Not only does Barrow love Farrakhan, he returns the love to Barrow:

And Farrakhan has loved Willie Barrow back, affectionately quoting her in his sermons. During the recent NOI scandal Willie Barrow served as the chair of the Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes. When the Nation of Islam Minister of Protocol Claudette Marie Muhammad joined the commission, its Jewish members resigned after Muhammad invited other commissioners to a speech by Farrakhan filled with anti-semitic invective. Barrow, however true to her ties with the Nation of Islam, continued to defend Muhammad and condemn the commissioners who resigned. 

It’s now beyond doubt that Obama has surrounded himself with the leaders of the America-hating neo-left movement, a twisted form of “liberalism” which embraces and promotes anti-white and anti-Semitic rhetoric, fomenting resentment and demanding payback . Is America willing to accept and can it endure the moral relativism which Obama would bring to the White House? What would be the cost? 

First, here is video of Father Michael Pfleger on June 22, 2008, at St. Sabina in Chicago:

Despite the “Statement of Cardinal Francis George” on May 30, 2008 — “concerning remarks of Fr. Michael Pfleger about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton during an address at Trinity United Church of Christ on Sunday May 25, 2008″ — Father Michael Pfleger, a radical activist priest, was permitted to return yesterday, after a three-week suspension, to his St. Sabina parish in Chicago.

Always the self-aggrandizing showman, Fr. Pfleger made a grand entrance — invoking the image of legendary boxing champion Muhammad Ali.

St. Sabina’s ushers distributed “light-blue fliers with a silhouette of boxing great Muhammad Ali in fighting stance that read: ‘Ain’t nothing like a comeback’.” The congregation rose to its feet, cheering Fr. Pfleger on as if he were entering a Las Vegas boxing arena for the championship fight of his life.

So what, you ask. Here’s why it matters: Fr. Michael Pfleger is a decades-long intimate confidante and associate of Barack Obama — as well as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Mother Khadijah Farrakhan (Farrakhan’s wife, seen here with Michelle Obama), the homophobic Rev. James Meeks, Trinity’s new minister Otis Moss, and more.

Exhibit One attesting to the Obama/Pfleger closeness:

In April and May, when Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama became estranged, it was Father Pfleger who spoke directly with and counseled both men, frequently. (It is astonishing, to me, that a presumptive presidential nominee would take regular phone calls from Fr. Pfleger, but it is true, according to Chicago media.)

Exhibit Two attesting to Pfleger’s involvement in the Rev. Wright/Obama saga:

Fox News’s Greta Van Susteran reported, on several shows, that she ran into Father Pfleger at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club, during Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s now infamous Q&A, after which Obama finally severed ties publicly with the Reverend who “is like a father to me.” (At whose behest did Father Pfleger fly to Washington, D.C. for the press club appearance? And why?)

Further, Father Pfleger created quite a group for St. Sabina’s fundraising committee, including Chicago mayor Richard Daley, Illinois state treasurer Alexei Giannoulias, and — get this — Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod.

From Truthteller’s “Saint Sabina Raises the Roof on Obama’s Den of Political Tricks and Corruption [Update]“:

[V]iew some of the names on this list of fundraisers:

• Richard Daley, the corrupt Obama backer behind the Hired Truck Scandal, an elaborate network of cronyism and corruption that rocked Chicago City Hall in 2004, 2005 and 2006;
• David Axelrod, Lead Strategist of the Obama campaign and Political Consultant to Richard “Hired Truck” Daley who also served as Consultant for Exelon, the Illinois nuclear giant whose lobbyists convinced Obama not to regulate companies that contaminated groundwater with radioactive toxic waste; and
• Illinois state Treasurer Alexei Giannoulias, whose bank, the Broadway Bank, granted loans to known mobsters and to indicted political fixer and Obama patron Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Father Michael Pfleger used to be featured on Barack Obama’s official Web site section for “Faith Testimonials.” Larry Johnson displayed the screenshot of Pfleger’s endorsement — now removed, of course, from Obama’s site — in his April story, “What Would Tip O’Neill Do About Barack’s Pastors? [Updated].”

Fr. Pfleger’s endorsement of Barack Obama is on Obama’s official Web site:

(Click on the image to see the full-sized screenshot of Pfleger’s endorsement [formerly] proudly displayed by Barack Obama.)

Barack Obama’s campaign staff hurriedly removed Father Pfleger’s testimonial after Larry Johnson’s story appeared.

Just as they’ve removed numerous other sections of their Web site when the material was exposed and became embarrassing to the Obama campaign.

These “now you see it, now you don’t” stunts ought to concern every voter.

Why on earth would the Obama campaign post the testimonial of a known radical priest who hangs out regularly — and constantly praises — Minister Louis Farrakhan, a known anti-Semite and black separationist?

What kind of judgment does that show about Obama? And his staff?

Why did Obama and his staff ever post this extremist’s photograph and words in the first place?

Surely Barack Obama himself saw the Father Pfleger testimonial and personally approved its appearance on his official campaign site.

We know that the two men are longtime close friends and fellow collaborators — for at least two decades — so perhaps Obama okayed the testimonial in honor of their friendship. But any politician with even minimal common sense would know better than to put this radical’s photograph and words on prominent display on his official campaign site.

By the way, Larry Johnson wrote in his must-read April story that his own former pastor told him about a conversation he once had with Tip O’Neill. The great Speaker of the House told Larry’s pastor this:

Politicians need to learn an important skill. If you are hearing things that go against your values you get up and walk out.

The troubling problem is that we do not know what Barack Obama’s true “values” are. Are they those of his longtime extremist friends Father Pfleger, Rev. Wright, and Bill Ayers? Or did Obama betray his own true “values” for over two decades by continuing to associate with these radicals and extremists?

In either case, Obama’s judgment is in serious doubt.

::::::

Thanks to V for the video, now up at NoQuarter’s channel at YouTube.

While researching the source of Michelle Obama’s alleged “whitey” rant, we discovered direct connections between the Nation of Islam (NOI), Stokely Carmichael, Jeremiah Wright’s Black Liberation Theology and, most prominently, Louis Farrakhan.

According to Larry Johnson’s sources, the Michelle Obama tape captures her in sordid company:

The sources who have seen the tape report that Michelle says
disparaging things about “whites” and that Louis Farrakhan is visible.
There is no identifying information on the segment they have seen to
identify the location or time when this was recorded. [emphasis added]

Those who are following this matter will recall that Michelle Obama, when asked about these allegations, is reported to have said that “whitey” is not a word used by African Americans today. However, we documented that Mrs. Obama’s primary text for her Princeton thesis was Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, and we showed how Carmichael used the term “whitey” repeatedly, thereby establishing an epistemological connection between Carmichael and Mrs. Obama. In other words, Michelle Obama is the intellectual offspring of Stokely Carmichael.

Before going further, it should be noted that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was once a member of the Nation of Islam, though it’s not clear when he was involved with NOI. Ryan Lizza of the New Republic first reported that:

Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had
studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”[Emphasis added]

But back to Stokely Carmichael. Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigations has released hundreds of pages from their files on Stokely Carmichael. It’s a treasure trove for those interested in the history of the civil rights movement. What we found most interesting, however, were the large number of documents connecting Carmichael with the NOI. For instance, the document below is an Airtel sent to Director Hoover on July 29, 1966, from Chicago. The subject is Stokely Carmichael and it concerns NOI leader Elijah Muhammed’s “CALL FOR SUMMIT MEETING, MAJOR CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS.”

There are three areas of interest for us: first, the Airtel came from the city of Chicago; second, the year 1966 (more on that later), and third, that the Nation of Islam — in the manner of the infamous mob meeting in Apalachin in 1957 — was organizing all of the major civil rights groups.

It has been widely reported, and documented here, that Carmichael was an “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party, and that he was the leader of the innocuous sounding Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The following document, however, shows that Carmichael was open to violence as a political tool–see the highlighted sentence below–”This nonviolence bit is just a philanthropic hang-up,” and that he was indeed a founder of the Black Panther Party:

In the following document we initially noticed Carmichael’s willingness to use violence. He is paraphrased as saying that “in his opinion, the black man is justified in using any means at his command to obtain what he believes is due him,” indicating an acceptance of violence as seen through a racial frame. What’s more interesting, however, is the next paragraph. “Louis Walcott, Minister of the New York City Muslim Mosque, Nation of Islam, also participated in this conference.” See the second paragraph below:

The name Louis, of course, was glaring. Could it be he? A quick Google search linked to a 1996 Morning Edition transcription of a Bob Edwards piece on Farrakhan:

The early life of Louis Farrakhan, who grew up as Louis Eugene Walcott, was heavily influenced by his loving but demanding mother and his poor but safe neighborhood of Roxbury, Boston, in the late 1940s.

Over the last decade, Louis Farrakhan has emerged as one of the most visible and formidable black political leaders in America

Let’s add up what we have so far: Stokely Carmichael, Michelle Obama’s primary source and intellectual ancestor, shared the stage with Louis Farrakhan, the same man who she allegedly shared a stage with when she said “whitey.”

Carmichael and Farrakhan may have shared more than a stage. The document below indicates but doesn’t conclude that Carmichael may have been a Muslim himself. Although heavily redacted, the FBI’s source said that “Stokely Carmichael, [redacted] as ‘one of us’ which this source interpreted as meaning a member of the Muslims.”

Whether or not Carmichael was a Muslim is unclear. What is clear is that at sometime in the summer of 1966 there was a meeting of the minds between some civil rights groups, black radicals, and the Nation of Islam. These groups organized into a force promoting and preaching a racist form of black nationalism. The document below describes a meeting that clearly shows this union of forces: Carmichael and Minister Louis “made it clear they wanted to unite with all Negro groups regardless of philosophy.” Note the date of August 18, 1966:

This takes us back to Jeremiah Wright and the question of when Wright was a Muslim. According to Wright’s Wikipedia entry:

In 1963, after two years of service, Wright joined the United States Navy and entered the Corpsman School at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Wright was then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“In 1966, as a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman,” the Wikipeida entry continues, Wright assisted with the care of President Johnson. Extrapolating from these dates, it appears that Wright was in Maryland between 1964 and 1966, and this may have been the time when he was a member of NOI. Wright didn’t start at Trinity until 1972, and evidently received spiritual training after receiving a master’s degree in English in 1969.

Also in Maryland in 1964 was Stokely Carmichael, where he was arrested “as a result of demonstrations in that city.” This doesn’t mean that Wright knew Carmichael, but surely Wright was cognizant of Carmichael’s work and of NOI as well. This is likely the time when he was a “Muslim and black nationalist.”

However Wright was radicalized, it is clear that he consciously appropriated the language and tenor of the Nation of Islam.

Wright’s statement that 9/11 was deserved retribution (“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans…America’s chickens are coming home to roost”) is a perfect echo of Malcolm X’s statement that “The assassination of Kennedy is a result of that way of life and thinking. The chickens came home to roost.”

Although it appears that Wright began his focus on Black Liberation Theology sometime after 1966, his racial attitudes and rhetoric have imitated that of NOI since at least 1970. Wright’s blaming the United States for creating AIDS to kill minorities is but just one example of his thinking being in lockstep with NOI.

Black Liberation Theology was first formed in 1966. According to NPR:

Black liberation theology originated on July 31, 1966, when 51 black pastors bought a full page ad in the New York Times and demanded a more aggressive approach to eradicating racism. They echoed the demands of the black power movement, but the new crusade found its source of inspiration in the Bible.

Keep in mind that NOI’s Elijah Mohammad called for a summit of black leaders on July 11, 1966, only 20 days prior to the official formation of Black Liberation Theology. If the dates don’t convince you of a synergy between NOI and Black Liberation Theology, please note Wright’s mentor — and Black Liberation Theology founder — James Cone’s words about NOI’s Malcolm X:

Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’ The false Christianity of the white-devil oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed.

The black intellectual’s goal, says Cone, is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.”

Couple these words with Wright’s own view that:

There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: ‘How can we become black?’

In 1998, Louis A. De-Caro, Jr. published a book titled Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity. De-Caro’s book underscores the racial nature and revolutionary intent of the NOI’s promotion of a black “Christianity”:

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam based their religious orthodoxy more on the Bible than on the Qur’an. In part, this was because they sought to convert black Christians. More- over, Elijah Muhammad taught that the Bible, actually the story of “dark people,” had been distorted by the white man in order to enslave and oppress black people in the United States.

PaganPower succinctly captures Michelle Obama’s thesis and shows how it dovetails with the thinking of Cone and Wright:

A logical expansion of this would be to say that white people, because of the color of their skin, have a separate innate belief system and have their separate innate set of morals too. In other words, it’s all in the melanin.

The Nation of Islam and Black Liberation Theology are two doors to the same room. Black Liberation Theology is a “palatable” form of “Christian” black nationalism. The fiery anti-American, race-baiting words of Wright, Meeks, Pfleger, and Moss are from the same philosophical cauldron as the Nation of Islam. It’s obvious now why Wright’s Trumpet Magazine featured Farrakhan on the cover:

Some have said that Michelle Obama’s thesis proves nothing because it was written more than 20 years ago. We suggest that it was no accident that the Obamas sought out Wright a mere 2-3 years after she wrote her thesis and stayed with him for nearly 20 years, even while he preached the vilest and most hateful sermons that our nation has been forced to hear. TexasDarlin writes:

It’s no wonder that the Obamas joined Trinity United, grew close to Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, and actively defended the church. And there is no doubt in this alert reader’s mind that Michelle Obama clung to Trinity as long as possible politically and, unfortunately for her husband, perhaps many years too long for most voters’ palates.

But the Obamas’ connections to the Nation of Islam go deeper than Rev. Wright. Louis Farrakhan’s political connections extend to the Obamas directly through Chicago politics and Tony Rezko. Larry Johnson writes that:

Before Barack came on the scene, THE MAN in his political district was Louis Farrakhan. No one could take Alice Palmer’s seat without Farrakhan’s blessing. No one. I do not fault Barack Obama for seeking out the blessing of Farrakhan, but the story of what was done behind the scenes to get rid of Barack’s predecessor—Alice Palmer—has not been told. A knowledgeable source tells me that Tony Rezko played a direct role in this feat. And Rezko has been tight with Farrakhan.

At some point, probably between 1964-66, Jeremiah Wright was a member of the Nation of Islam and was indoctrinated into its odious brand of racist theology. And make no mistake, Wright’s race-baiting is not indicative of the vast majority of black churches. A pastor at LivePrayer writes:

Please hear me very clear. Black liberation theology is a perverse view of the Scriptures and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a radical view held by a very small minority of black pastors. This is NOT representative of the black church or the overwhelming majority of black pastors who preach and teach the true Gospel of Jesus Christ without looking at it thru the lens of color. Every black pastor I know condemns Dr. Wright and this perverse racist theology.

In 1966, a group of “Christian” ministers, at the behest of Elijah Mohammad, began to preach the same teachings as NOI. Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan actively worked to bridge the gap between these two groups, and Carmichael would soon publish a book espousing much the same separatist ideas. Carmichael’s book “guided” Michelle Obama’s thesis and soon she and Barack would join Trinity United Church of Christ.

The continuity of the teachings of Carmichael, Farrakhan, Cone, and Wright is incontrovertible.

Christopher Hitchens asks:

how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

And of course there is this picture of Michelle and Mrs. Farrakhan, a picture which speaks more than a thousand words: