Andrew C. McCarthy & Claudia Rosett
‘It is this world … where white folks’ greed runs a world in need[.]” Barack Obama was writing his memoir, Dreams from My Father, and quoting his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wright is a racist proponent of Black Liberation Theology, a Marxist creed that depicts America as an imperial, terrorist, apartheid state.
It was a black-separatist creed that Obama and his wife, Michelle, chose to make a core part of their lives. Year after year, they attended Wright’s Trinity Church. They contributed tens of thousands of their personal dollars to it — and Obama added tens of thousands more when he sat with his friend Bill Ayers on the board of the Leftist Woods Fund.
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Most demonstrably, the Obamas chose Wright to baptize their children, whom they brought week after week to Trinity, freely exposing them to Wright’s hate-mongering about their country.
Wright is such a baleful figure that there really is no defending Obama on this score. So, instead, his media allies have engaged in risible psychoanalysis: As if, though Obama had to pass by about 100 other churches in Chicago to get to Trinity, we are off-base in inferring that he was drawn to Wright’s message.
Of course that is not going to fly. Wright is what enabled Hillary Clinton to turn a primary rout into a horserace Obama would have lost if the revelations had come any earlier. Desperate to pull their guy across the final finish line, the Obamedia has done what the media can still do powerfully well: Reduce the story’s impact by ignoring it. In this, they’ve had a much needed assist from the craven error of the McCain campaign. Petrified of being called a racist by a bunch of race-baiters, the Maverick has taken Wright off the table.
But Wright can’t be taken completely off the table. Obama has planted him there too firmly. The “white folks’ greed” drivel is drawn from a Wright sermon, “The Audacity to Hope.” Obama was so taken by it that the sermon provided the (derived) title of
The Audacity of Hope, the young Chicago pol’s second memoir — making him the first presidential candidate to emerge from the U.S. Senate with two autobiographies and no legislative accomplishments.
Wright’s overtones echo whenever the usually hyper-scripted Obama departs from the script and lets slip his intention to “spread the wealth,” enforce “redistributive change,” or remediate an America he has
compared to Nazi Germany. Wright shone through when Obama
rejected the individual liberty of the capitalist system — America’s “strong bias toward individual action,” which “idolize[s] the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing” — in favor of “collective action[,] … institutions and organizations.”
And while the candidate has obviously put his irascible wife on ice during the campaign’s homestretch, one needn’t deeply penetrate Michelle’s verbal bombshells about “just downright mean” America to make out the preacher’s echoes. Nor does it take a deep wade through the anti-integration railings in Michelle’s college thesis — Princeton having admitted her notwithstanding mean old America’s apartheid society — to realize how uniquely receptive to Wright’s bile she would have been. Ditto, again, Obama himself: as Hank De Zutter wrote after interviewing Obama for this favorable 1995
profile, he’d learned to see “integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground.”
The United States gave the Obamas privileged educational opportunities. At America’s top colleges, they were steeped in Leftist radicalism. As they came of age, they thought nothing of exposing their children to an ideology that paints their country as racist, rife with injustice, and in need of drastic, fundamental change. And why should we expect otherwise? It is what they believe.
It is also the way things are done in the circle of friends they developed during years of living in Hyde Park — friends like Rashid and Mona Khalidi, and Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
Like Obama’s empirical remoteness from what he diagnoses as Black America’s struggle against white folks’ greed, Rashid Khalidi is well insulated from the reality of what he portrays as the illegitimate Jewish state’s remorseless oppression of Palestinians.
Two
New York Times obituaries,
one published when his father, Ismail, died in 1968, and
the other when his more famous uncle, Hussein, died in 1962, paint a portrait of Rashid Khalidi as Palestinian royalty — albeit with elusive Palestinian roots. Ismail Khalidi was actually a Saudi citizen, educated in American schools in Lebanon and in the U.S. — including at Columbia, his son Rashid’s current pulpit, where the elder Khalidi got his doctorate in 1955.