When Barack Missed The Sermons, Did He Read Wright's Racist Bulletins?

Sweetness and Light has a post about Barack Obama’s church, in which Pastor Wright included in his bulletin [PDF]--on the "Pastor's Page" no less--an open letter to Oprah Winfrey (a member of the congregation at the time) in the June 10, 2007 edition of their bulletin. The letter was written by Ali Baghdadi an Arab-American activist who has acted as a Middle East advisor to Elijah Muhammad the founder of the Nation of Islam, as well as Minister Louis Farrakhan and has met with Castro, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, and Kadafi among others.

On the one hand, the letter contains the usual propaganda:

My family tree and my roots in Palestine go back to time immemorial, long before Islam, Christianity and Judaism came into being...

...You must know that Zionist Jews from all over the world, particularly Europe, came to my Palestine, not as guests, but as settlers and occupiers in the early part of the 20^th century. The natives were referred to as “snakes” from which the land must be cleansed. In 1948 they occupied 72% of my land and emptied out over 500 Arab (Christian and Muslim) towns and villages. In 1967 they occupied the remaining 28%. Six million of us have been living in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon for the last fifty nine years, even though the United Nations ordered the Israeli government to allow us to return (1948 UN resolution 194).

...As we offered the Crusaders who occupied our holy lands for two hundred years, Jews can stay and share our land, if they wish to live in a free and democratic Palestine that respects the rights of all, regardless of their religion, race, or ethnicity.

But the letter goes further, and Barack's pastor includes all of it:

Many pregnant Arab women have lost their babies while waiting for clearance on their way to hospitals. There are over 550 of these checkpoints that divide our land into ghettos in the West Bank alone. Though the water we get does not meet our basic needs, notice the swimming pools Israelis enjoy in settlements built on our stolen lands.

...During the Second Intifadah, the uprising against Israeli occupation, Muslim and Christian activists, chased by the Israeli death squads, were given refuge in the church.

...I must tell you that Israel was the closest ally to the White Supremacists of South Africa. In fact, South Africa allowed Israel to test its nuclear weapons in the ocean off South Africa. The Israelis were given a blank check: they could test whenever they desired and did not even have to ask permission. Both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs. [emphasis added]

This is the kind of garbage that Pastor Wright not only believes, but also distributes to his congregation, in addition to what he says in his sermons.

According to World Net Daily:

The latest revelation about published material from Obama's church follows the discovery last week by BizzyBlog that Trinity United Church of Christ 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.

That article adds that

Obama e-mailed the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a statement regarding the Hamas publication in his church newsletter explaining he "certainly wasn't in church when that outrageously wrong Los Angeles Times piece was re-printed in the bulletin."

Forget about the apologetics offered by Obama and others--the question returns: what is Obama doing there, and how much of what Wright says and writes does he believe?

Technorati Tag: Obama and Jeremiah Wright.