March 22, 2008

by Bill Levinson

The entire country is now aware of the hate-filled ravings of Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright. Obama’s membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ is entirely consistent with the Black identity politics, if not Black nationalist politics, that he describes in Dreams From My Father.

The United Church of Christ is meanwhile, as shown by the Anti-Defamation League associated with the Sabeel Ecuminical Liberation Theology Center. Not only does Sabeel question Israel’s right to exist, it is on record as referring to the establishment of Israel as the “nakba” or “catastrophe.” If this is not bad enough, the Trinity United Church of Christ re-published material from Hamas: a Foreign Terrorist Organization that is specifically in the business of murdering Westerners, and especially Israeli Jews. The decision to give a platform to terrorists is entirely consistent with Jeremiah Wright’s own placement of quotation remarks around “state” when referring to Israel, as if to say “So-called State of Israel.”

Here is the Trinity United Church of Christ bulletin in question, which we have downloaded for the record. Note that it is hosted at TUCC’s own Web site, and it is therefore impossible to argue that it is a fabrication, photomanipulation, or other fake. We direct your attention to the Pastor’s Page (the pastor in question being Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright) on pages 10 and 11. You will find there, over the footer “Sermons copyrighted by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr,” a republication of an opinion piece from Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas is a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) as defined by the U.S. State Department.

Who is this Mousa Abu Marzook individual to whom Barack Hussein Obama’s pastor is giving two pages of Trinity United Church of Christ’s official bulletin? He is the kind of individual for which the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the best information source: “During the second trial on the remaining charges in the indictment, in April 2005, the jury found that Bayan Elashi, Ghassan Elashi, Basman Elashi and Infocom Corporation conspired together and sent money to co-defendant Mousa Abu Marzook, an investor in Infocom and a self-admitted leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, a/k/a Hamas. In 1995, the Department of Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, designated Hamas as a Specially Designated Terrorist Organization, making it illegal for any United States person or entity to conduct any business with Hamas or its representatives.”

The U.S. Department of Justice adds, “In 1995, Marzook was designated as a terrorist whose actions threatened the Middle East peace process – a designation that made it illegal for any U.S. person or entity to conduct any transaction with Marzook.” The following document from the U.S. Senate adds,

More recently, on December 4, 2001, the Bush Administration exposed the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development as a front organization for Hamas. According to its year 2000 tax return, Holy Land Foundation (HLF) total revenue exceeded $13 million. In a detailed 49-page memorandum, the U.S. Government established that these funds were used by Hamas to support schools and indoctrinate children to grow up into suicide bombers. Money raised by the Holy Land Foundation was also used by Hamas to recruit suicide bombers and to support their families.

Five days before the September 11 attacks, the FBI raided the offices and froze the assets of Infocom, an Internet company that shares personnel, office space, and board members with the Holy Land Foundation, officials said. The two organizations were formed in California around the same time, and both received seed money from Hamas leader and Specially Designated Terrorist Mousa Abu Marzook.

We have therefore established that the same Mousa Abu Marzook to whom Barack Obama’s church has given a forum is a Specially Designated Terrorist and a leader of a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Now we will return to what Barack Obama’s church put in its official bulletin.

PASTOR’S PAGE
A FRESH VIEW OF THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE
From the Los Angeles Times
Hamas’ stand
An official of the movement describes its goals for all of Palestine.
By Mousa Abu Marzook [Hamas leader and Specially Designated Terrorist]

July 10, 2007

DAMASCUS, SYRIA - HAMAS’ RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.

It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law - a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it - a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

It is quite natural that this Hamas terrorist thinks his organization has a legal right to fire rockets at Israeli cities, recruit suicide bombers to detonate bombs with poisoned shrapnel in shopping malls and Passover seders, and murder Israeli civilians. We can only speculate as to whether Barack Obama’s church shares these views (especially in the context of UCC’s association with Sabeel), but the terrorist’s statement “Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners” is worth examination. Perhaps TUCC parishioners like Barack Obama don’t object to the murder of Israeli Jews–after all, UCC has close ties with an organization that regards the creation of Israel as a “catastrophe”–but we hope they will object to the murder of their fellow American citizens. The Israeli Defense Forces show that Hamas had a chat site on which its members could plan the murder of Americans.

The Hamas Website Provides A Platform For Surfers Who Support The Murder Of American Citizens Participants in a chat- forum of the official Hamas website have discussed ways and methods to murder American citizens.

What appears below are their comments, as found on the site.

1. Al- Awsad (user number 1):
Once a week, a group of American “dogs” come near us on the sea front. I have been following them for a long time and am interested in your suggestions for ways to get rid of them secretly.

…3. MSKZ (user number 3):
Read Koran verses on them and then kill them one by one, after you have made sure they are Israeli American tyrants.

…7. Saafalaha (user number 5):
Why be discrete? Let them serve as an example for others like them. Let the Americans understand that they are not safe in Muslim countries. Burning their car is excellent or you could shoot all of them. The country is filled with weapons.

As reported by the Jerusalem Post,

Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, declared during a Friday sermon at a Sudan mosque that America and Israel will be annihilated and called upon Allah to kill Jews and Americans “to the very Last One.”

…The Hamas spokesperson concluded with a prayer, saying: “Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet, defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.”

Again, this is the organization to which Barack Hussein Obama’s church gave a platform in its official church bulletin of July 22, 2007. The terrorist continues,

The sticking point of “recognition” has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel’s “right” to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian “recognize” the monstrous crime carried out by Israel’s founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

There’s that Nakba (catastrophe) thing again, right in the middle of the Trinity United Church of Christ’s official bulletin of July 22 2007. This is the institution of which Barack Hussein Obama has been a member for 20 years, and which he joined AFTER Jeremiah Wright accompanied Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to Libya. Obama knew what he was joining at the time, and we will see that it is entirely consistent with his own embrace of black identity, if not black nationalist, politics. Hamas terrorist Marzook continues,

I, for one, do not trouble myself over “recognizing” Israel’s right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the “rights” of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

I look forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: “Here, here is your family’s house by the sea, here are your
lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again.” Then we can speak of a future together.

MOUSA ABU MARZOOK is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Sunday, July 22, 2007 11 © Sermons copyrighted by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr

Res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself. This is the kind of material that Barack Obama’s church has chosen to welcome into its official bulletins. Not only that, Jeremiah Wright personally wrote material that seems to question Israel’s right to exist (http://tucc.org/upload/tuccbulletin_july8.pdf, page 9).

Islam has as many manifestations as Christianity and Judaism, but most Americans are only fed a media diet on Islam as it relates to the “war on terror” and the Palestinian muslim problem in the “state” of Israel.

…Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A Wright, Jr Senior Pastor

It is well known that Palestinian militants and others who do not recognize Israel’s right to exist write “Israel” in quotes, or else leave out a letter (e.g. Isr-el). By placing “state” in quotes, it seems that Barack Hussein Obama’s pastor means “the so-called state of Israel.”

We do not think it is any accident that Barack Hussein Obama belongs to a church whose pastor not only spews hatred of the United States but also reprints opinion pieces from terrorists. Obama joined this church about 20 years ago, well after Jeremiah Wright accompanied the well known anti-Semite, racist, and Catholic-hating bigot Louis Farrakhan to Libya to meet with dictator Moammar Khadafy. We remind our readers that Obama would not “reject” Louis Farrakhan’s support until Tim Russert, who was joined in his effort by Hillary Clinton, cornered him like a rat during a nationally-televised debate. In addition, Barack Obama’s Web site welcomed a page from the New Black Panther Party (http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=434 for screenshot), which the Anti-Defamation League denounces as a racist and anti-Semitic hate organization (http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Black_Panther.asp?xpicked=3&item=Black_Panther), until a widening scandal on the Internet compelled its removal.

Relevent excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, which we have personally verified after buying the book, suggest that black identity politics, if not outright black nationalist politics, played a central role in shaping Obama’s ideology.

…I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites… (page xv)

That was the problem with people like Joyce [a college classmate of Italian, African-American, Native American, and French ethnicity]. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounced real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. …The truth was that I understood [Joyce], her and all the other black kids who felt the way she did. In their mannerisms, their speech, their mixed-up hearts, I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that’s exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question my own racial credentials all over again. …To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. (pages 99-100)

“[Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness] teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me just understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.” (page 103)

Pages 195-204: [Obama describes his relationship with Rafiq al-Shabazz, a self-proclaimed Black Nationalist]

It is therefore entirely reasonable to conclude that Barack Hussein Obama knowingly and willfully chose to join a church with a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa” with the full knowledge of what Jeremiah Wright was at the time, and then to expose his family to the same hate-spewing pastor. It is also entirely consistent with Mr. Obama’s decision to praise and endorse Al Sharpton and his National Action Network, both of which have extensive records of promoting hatred of white people and especially Jews.

Screenshot of Hamas opinion piece in the TUCC official bulletin

Screenshot of Jeremiah Wright piece that puts “state” in quotes when referring to Israel