To refresh, the Reverend Wright made extremist anti-american comments during sermons at various points in time. See the wikipedia page here. The main thrust of the remarks is that United States acts like god, treats people as sub-human, and is responsible for various crimes that directly led to 9-11 terrorist attacks. The pinnacle is when the Reverend urges his flock not sing God Bless America, but "God Damn America."
Senator Obama's response is to cast the remarks in racial terms. In his speech of March 18th, Obama stated inpart:
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.See the complete text of the speech here among other places.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Thus, Obama's argument is that the Reverend's comments must be viewed as part of a racial commentary on the government and the racial history of the U.S.
But, this almost totally false. In reality this is part of the standard progressive right (liberal) critique of the U.S.'s capitalist economic system and Republican form of government. The evidence of this is contained in comments, contemporaneous with those of the Reverend's, by other progressive and socialist ideologues.
Consider the following:
No doubt this is the result of injustice the U.S. practices against the weak in the world.
Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Leader of Hamas, published in the October 15th, 2001 edition of the New York Times.
During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places. Moreover, far from being the main perpetrators of terrorism, Islamic peoples have been its victims -- more often than not of an American fundamentalism and its proxies.
Editorial in British newspaper The Guardian as quoted in The New Republic, Oct 12, 2001 edition.
Chomsky, himself an American, refers to the United States as a "leading terrorist state," using as an example the Reagan administration's invasion of Nicaragua in the 1980s and the subsequent "devastating economic war" in that country. Though the invasion was condemned by the World Court, the United States responded by ignoring the ruling and escalating its attack on the country, killing thousands of people in the process. A review of Noam Chomsky's 9-11. As quoted in
The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo) January 27, 2002 Sunday
And please read the column by Walter Williams of October 29, 2001 published in the Washington Times on Nov 4, 2001. Read the complete text here.
In fact, the Reverend attributes his post 9-11 comments to former Ambassador Edward Peck (see the wikipedia entry).
Yassin isn't black, neither is Chomsky, neither is Peck. This IS NOT A racial issue, it is a political ideological issue, a progessive left viewpoint writ large. Senator Obama claims to not agree with it but also claims to be a progressive. Make your own judgements of the Senator's ideological beliefs, but do not for minute buy this spin that Reverend's Wright anti-americanism is reflective of a black critique of the American experience.
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