Jim Haygood read Alice Walker’s oblation to Obama in the Guardian more closely than I did and pointed out her important comment re Israel/Palestine:
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the US to cease acting as if they don’t understand what is going on. But most of all I want someone with the confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend", and this Obama has shown he can do.
I love that: the people of the U.S. acting as if they don’t understand what’s going on. Also interesting: on the Guardian message board under this piece, most of the comments seem to be about the Palestinians.
In this context I’d cite Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s angry letter of a year ago to New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, which was published by Time Magazine yesterday on-line. Wright was hot that he gave two hours of time to Kantor re Obama, and a short critical piece was all that resulted (at first anyway; Kantor later did a longer, prescient, and somewhat less critical piece). Anyway, Wright brought Jewish religious issues into his argument. He noted that Kantor is Jewish; and suggested too that the Times is a Jewish paper…
Out of a two-hour conversation with you about Barack’s spiritual journey and my protesting to you that I had not shaped him nor formed him, that I had not mentored him or made him the man he was, even though I would love to take that credit, you did not print any of that. When I told you, using one of your own Jewish stories from the Hebrew Bible as to how God asked Moses, “What is that in your hand?,” that Barack was like that when I met him. Barack had it “in his hand.” Barack had in his grasp a uniqueness in terms of his spiritual development that one is hard put to find in the 21st century, and you did not print that….
Maybe it was my faith in the Jewish Holy Day of Roshashana. Maybe it was my being caught up in the euphoria of the Season of Lent; but whatever it is or was, I was sadly mistaken. There is no repentance on the part of The New York Times.
Intense guy, Wright. Smart, too; those lines about Obama’s spiritual development are beautiful and helpful. I wonder if Wright leaked that letter to Time Magazine. Some day he’s going to have a lot to say about all this. Right now he’s wrapped up in a carpet on the South Side of Chicago, and taped with duct tape.
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Phil and I overlapped with one of the Sulzbergers while we were at Harvard.
Because of mutual friends I once joined them for a lunch at Adams House. They could have been goofing on me, but I remember that I was told that they were Episcopalians.
Even so, they do understand the ethnic prejudices of their main advertisers.
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"Wright was hot that he gave two hours of time to Kantor re Obama, and a short critical piece was all that resulted (at first anyway; Kantor later did a longer, prescient, and somewhat less critical piece)."
Jodi Kantor's longer April 30th article is quite insightful. Surely the media-savvy Rev. Wright knows that being quoted out of context by reporters is the norm. But if his frank, furious response to the initial hatchet job goaded Kantor into doing the second article, then it worked. These are the bits that really captured something significant:
————
Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit.
It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.
In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”
————
Coming out of the Asian polyglot culture of Hawaii, where blacks are only a minor presence, one can imagine how a full-frontal encounter with the deep currents of black culture in Chicago affected Barack Obama. Most of the African-Americans in Chicago have Mississippi roots — Oprah Winfrey, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters. The Illinois Central railroad was a direct transmission belt for the blues music and black religion of the South, both of which drew their paradoxical power from speaking for the underdog. The music derived from the West African culture of the Congo. The religion came from the Hebrew underdog narrative, which I heard sung in a black church a couple of weeks ago: "Tell ol' Pharaoh, let my people go."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Down_Moses
And what could be more inspiring to Obama's political ambitions than Rev. Wright's achievement of building Trinity United Church of Christ from 72 members in 1972 to around 10,000 today, in a predominantly white denomination? That's charisma, bruthuh.
The marginalization of Rev. Wright for barbed remarks about race is a smokescreen, I think. Jodi Kantor put her finger on the REAL problem: "On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies." The notion of shared responsibility, shared guilt, for 9/11 is a truth that America simply cannot confront. Although intersections between the events of 9/11 and Israel are few and minor — the five "dancing Israelis" in New Jersey; Netanyahu's crass but frank remark that 9/11 might benefit U.S.-Israel relations — Jews seem to be particularly leery of digging beneath the surface of the official narrative, for fear of fueling antisemitic theories.
Ultimately Rev. Wright must be crucified under false pretenses. His acolyte Obama's fate is different. He's obviously, in his very bloodlines, a cultural synthesizer. But the true mission which drives him is not yet apparent, if he even knows himself. He could rescue America from the abyss, or lead it over the edge. Good luck to him. What I want to know is, what music moves him?
None of us can know what Obama will do. But we have our suspicions that he will do the right thing. The lobby shares our suspicions and is one reason they are so frantically backing Hillary. Milton-Scaife obviously fears Obama.
Actually, I do not think it is important in what he believes but in how effective he will be as a leader. For example, for sake of argument imagine that he is opposed to the basing of US troops around the globe and he wanted to begin the process of closing our foreign bases. There is no chance for that — the military culture is too deeply ingrained in our society for that to happen. I also do not believe that he could accomplish much in solving the IP conflict — that policy requires aipac approval and their goal remains keeping the West Bank settlements. No single president can do that.
However, there are things that he could accomplish. Just having him elected will change how rest of the world views us overnight. He will get us out of Iraq for sure. Maybe there are some other good things, we can hope for.
I read that article about Hamas incitement in Gaza. Obviously Phil Weiss doesn't think that it's a big deal. And actually thinks it's ok. So here is my question. The Times is a public company. The Sulzbergerr are Christian has is the editorial board. And it has a pronounced pro-Palestinian bias. So why does Phil ( the ape/pig ) Weiss, and Jeremiah ( the spook/spade ) Wright. Think that it's a Jewish paper.
Who IS Jim Haygood? And how did he learn so much?!!
"Although intersections between the events of 9/11 and Israel are few and minor — the five "dancing Israelis" in New Jersey; Netanyahu's crass but frank remark that 9/11 might benefit U.S.-Israel relations — Jews seem to be particularly leery of digging beneath the surface of the official narrative, for fear of fueling antisemitic theories."
I'm not sure how one can believe that Israel's complicity in the attacks can be described as few or minor(unless one is trying to be facetious). Actually there were just 3 dancing Israels at Liberty Park. Five spies were picked up later in the day by the Bergen County police in the Mossad vehicle of choice a white Chevrolet van with their video tape of their celebration at LP and marked maps showing a foreknowledge of the attack. The tapes and maps are now classified by our Government even though we were told the Mossad spies were not involved. The same group of Mossad spies were living next door to some of the hijackers in New Jersey and the rest of the hijackers were surrounded by another group of spies known as the Israeli Art Student spies in Hollywood Florida. Israeli war criminal and accomplice to the murder of 3,000 Americans, Bibi Netanyahoo had knowledge of the spying operation and the attack while prime minister as did Diaper Dan Sharon who followed him. All of this is fact not theory as our ethnocentric media would like you to believe.
Why Do We Let Israel Get Away With Murder…Literally
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-do-we-let-israel-get-away-with.html
If Israel Had Knowledge of the 9/11 Attacks and Did Not Tell Us…Should We Still Love Israel?
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2007/11/if-israel-knew-about-911-and-did-not.html
The Greatest Story Never Told
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/02/christopher-ketcham.html
So liberal white boy, you believe that 9/11 was a Jewish plot. Did the sand niggers/ camel jockeys have anything to do with it, anything at all?
RE the Sulzbergers, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., like several of his cousins, had only a tenuous tie to his Jewish heritage. His mother, Barbara Grant, wasn’t Jewish, and shortly after she and Punch were divorced, in 1956, she became an Episcopalian. Eventually, Arthur and his sister Karen were confirmed at Manhattan’s St. James Episcopal Church. At the time, Punch was discomfited about his children’s being brought up as Christians, but not enough to insure that they were brought up as Jews.
RE The Times–
Due to its share type(s) structure and in relation to its board of directors, The Times, although gone public, remains family controlled.
The Sulzbergers are Christian? In 1999, when Punch Sulzberger was asked whether the family now considers itself Jewish, he replied, “It’s a family that to a great extent tries to operate in the best part of the Jewish tradition—the Reform tradition we were brought up in—and those principles are spread pretty well through the family.” Asked to enumerate the principles, he said, “Sharing with people who are less fortunate; tolerance; social justice.” They are, he added, “very similar to the principles that guide the New York Times, and the family is very interested in insuring that those principles continue.”
The Editorial board is Çhristian? Andrew Rosenthal, the current editorial page editor of The New York Times, is in charge of the paper's opinion pages, both in the newspaper and online. He oversees the editorial board, the Letters and Op-Ed departments, as well as the Editorial and Op-Ed sections of NYTimes.com. The editorial department of the paper is completely separate from the news operations and Mr. Rosenthal answers directly to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
He is assisted by Carla Robbins, deputy editor; David Shipley, deputy editor for Op-Ed and digital; Adam Cohen, assistant editor; and Thomas Feyer, the Letters editor.
Under his direction, the 18 members of the board prepare the paper's editorials. The board holds regular meetings to discuss current issues. The editorials are written by individual board members in consultation with their colleagues, and are edited by Mr. Rosenthal, Ms. Robbins and Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Rosenthal became editorial page editor on Jan. 8, 2007.
When A.M. Rosenthal was named managing editor in 1969, it marked the first time a Jew had sat atop the Times’s editorial hierarchy. (The Sulzbergers, and Adolph Ochs before them, had always been concerned that if a Jew was running a Jewish-owned paper, readers would wonder about the religious influence on the news pages.)
In 1975, when A.M. Rosenthal, the top editor of The New York Times, needed to hire a clerk, he selected a copy boy named Ari Goldman, a graduate of Yeshiva University and probably the only Orthodox Jew in the Times newsroom at the time.
During A. M. Rosenthal's formative years on the paper, the leading editors included two Southern patricians, Turner Catledge and Clifton Daniel. The so-called "bullpen" of supervising editors tended to be mostly Roman Catholic.
Some of the Jews in the (1940's) newsroom (or their parents) had Anglicized their names, Shapiro becoming Shepard, Topolsky becoming Topping. The foreign correspondent who would become Punch Sulzberger's closest friend, Sydney Gruson.
As for the newspaper that Rosenthal entered in 1944 as a 21-year-old cub reporter, it preemptively assigned him the byline of A.M. Rosenthal, as it had similarly imposed initials on two other Abrahams, A.H. Raskin and A.H. Weiler. There were some identifiably Jewish names in the Times's pages, particularly that of the columnist Meyer Berger, but Abraham was considered somehow too Semitic, or perhaps too closely linked to its diminutive Abie, which could be an endearment or an ethnic slur, depending on whose mouth uttered it.
AS MANAGING editor and then executive editor, the posts he occupied from 1969 until 1986, Rosenthal undid one of the Times's final, unspoken limitations on Jews. This one held that no Jew could report on Israel, lest the bloody flag of dual loyalties be raised.
He installed David Shipler as bureau chief in Jerusalem, assuming, based on the reporter's surname and coarse black beard, that he was Jewish. Learning only after the appointment that Shipler was actually Gentile, Rosenthal waited several more years until the correspondent finished his tenure and then awarded the Jerusalem post to Thomas L. Friedman.
Far from ensuring favorable coverage of Israel, the combination of Rosenthal as editor and Friedman as correspondent resulted in tough, penetrating, controversial stories. Rosenthal had to be secure enough in his own Jewish identity to shrug off the innumerable attacks on him as being a "self-hating Jew."
This was the same Rosenthal who was an American patriot, and essentially a Cold Warrior, and yet had no hesitation about publishing the Pentagon Papers as well as Seymour Hersh's exposes of CIA dirty tricks. (After being pushed out as executive editor at the mandatory retirement age of 65, Rosenthal took on an op-ed column, and there he did give full-throated vent to his views on Israel, reliably espousing the Likud line through the 1990s.
My dear young white liberal friend, it would be perfectly possible for the owners of the WTC to be complicit in the pre-rigging of the three WTC buildings that fell, without this constituting Israeli government involvement. It is even possible that the sappers were Israelis, after all, there are state of the art units such as Sayeret Yahalom that do nothing else, but it still doesn't imply government involvement. We live in a world in which governments perhaps control less than they pretend.
For Pinch's religion see http://www.nndb.com/people/638/000024566/ .
RE that NYT Jerusalem bureau chief's article about Hamas incitement in Gaza–Richard Silverstein shows just how unbalanced it was, begining with the bias of Memri translations, and detailing utter lack of context.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/
It is possible that Muslims could have carried out the plot SOG but I think their primary role in 9/11 was to be blamed for it. It was a damn shame that the Israelis don't love American Jews as much as American Jews seem to love Israel. Remember not long after the towers collapsed the mass hysteria in the media about the possibility that 4,000 Israelis were among the victims. The final count SOG turned out to be one. He happened to be there accidentally. The only Israeli tenant a shipping co. at the towers moved out the week before the towers were struck. They abandoned their leasehold a few months before there lease ended (Doesn’t sound very Jewish to me). Sure was lucky for them right SOG. Pure coincidence I’m sure. And the folks that purchased those stock options on American Airlines stock and other companies, why do you think we haven't been told the identities of the Israeli's are that purchased them. And what about the Odigo employees that got the message about coming attack. Odigo, Infosys and Amdocs of course were the Israeli telecommunications companies who assisted the Mossad spies in finding the hijackers in the first place. Odigo was located just down the street from the towers. And what about Dominick Suter the owner of Urban Movers? He employed the celebrants at Liberty Park picked up by Bergen county police later turned over to the FBI. He after being interviewed by the FBI some how managed to get a plane and skedaddle back to Israel when all other airlines were grounded. He abandoned his business. Why is it though that the Israeli’s didn’t warn the Jewish Americans in the towers who died that day SOG. I understand why they didn’t warn the rest of us mongrels but why didn’t they warn the American Jews. You don’t have any answers for us do you. You like the rest of the Zionist treason monkeys are not interested in the truth. You just fling your monkey dung at those trying to observe you like the average chimp. It’s all about distraction.
What Should Americans Fear More…Islamofascism Or Zionist Treachery and Treason?
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-should-americans-fear.html
It is incredible that the media is not looking into Hillary's prayer group, "The Fellowship" with many prominent GOP attendees as well. The Wayne Madsen piece link shows just how far back their chicanery goes, yet Hillary has not walked out on them as she said she would if Wright was her pastor.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html
and
http://www.insider-magazine.com/ChristianMafia.htm
The pro-Hillary site TN Guerilla Woman pulled these links because it shows just how weak her position is on this and the hypocirsy of throwing stones.
For religionists worried about the appropriateness of damning America (I'm atheist myself), the OT (Genesis) states that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Isreal, yet no one seems to be making any linkages with the candidates and the concept of American damnation should it not sufficiently kowtow to Israel.
the classic piece on "the fellowship" is jeffrey sharlet's "jesus plus nothing":
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525
I mean, I assume it's the same people?
Thanks Rowan. Looks excellent. Another part of the stink made about Pastor Wright is the home that he bought through the gifts of his congregation but as I remember, part of the appeal of the Fellowship is providing trendy digs in the DC area for next to no money.
Team Hillary is working behind the scenes on the superdelegates saying that the Wright issue will sink Obama and yet simply examining Hillary's history with the Fellowship would make this a moot point. Again, the question "cui bono" (who benefits?) makes it clear that Hillary, all her whining about media unfairness notwithstanding, is treated with different standards.
"the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries" (op.cit.)
Why would Reverend Wright allow his daugthers' church related magazine to honor Farrakhan as man of the year when Obama was running for President?
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