Topic: NewsBusters
The headline of a March 13 NewsBusters post by John Stephenson, regarding newly reported controversial remarks regarding 9/11 by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Barack Obama's church in Chicago, asks: "Will Media Hold Obama To Repudiate His Pastor's Hateful Remarks?" Stephenson asks again in the post: "When will Obama repudiate the message of hate from his own minister, who is a part of his campaign?" he then answers his own question: "Don't expect Obama to repudiate these remarks." Stephenson then proudly states that "FOX has been reporting this like the damning story it is," adding, "Will this story get the legs it should have, or will the media try to sweep it under the rug?"
Sorry to interrupt Stephenson's witchhunt, but Obama has, in fact, specifically disavowed Wright's 9/11 comments that Stephenson is in such high dudgeon about. In fact, he did so nearly a year ago.
A March 14 WorldNetDaily column by Hal Lindsey similarly gins up some outrage over Wright's remarks, then selectively quotes the April 2007 New York Times article in which Obama disavowed the statements:
Note especially Wright's assessment of the attacks on New York, Washington and the skies over Pennsylvania: "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Is this one of those comments Obama's "old uncle" says that he doesn't "always" agree with – or one of those he doesn't find "particularly controversial"?
Not really, says Obama. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative," he told a New York Times reporter.
What the Times actually wrote (with the relevant part Lindsey didn't include in bold):
On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”
Such statements involve “a certain deeply embedded anti-Americanism,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies religious issues and public policy. “A lot of people are going to say to Mr. Obama, are these your views?”
Mr. Obama says they are not.
“The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” he said in a recent interview. He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks, Mr. Obama said, but “it sounds like he was trying to be provocative.”
Will Stephenson or Lindsey ever acknowledge this? Don't count on it.
Meanwhile, back at NewsBusters, Mark Finkelstein weighs in: "Raise your hand if you think [CNN's Anderson] Cooper wouldn't be so quick to move on if the Republican presidential nominee had such a close relationship with a pastor of comparably extreme views."
Wait -- wasn't John McCain recently endorsed by an evangelist who has called the Catholic Church "The Great Whore" and a "false cult system"? Those aren't "extreme views"?
Apparently not, as far as Finkelstein is concerned -- as we've noted, he and his fellow MRC employees have not been particularly moved to denounce Hagee, even though they have a history of criticizing statements they consider anti-Catholic.
UPDATE: Also worth noting is that McCain has as a "spiritual adviser" one Rev. Rod Parsley, who has called upon Christians to wage a "war" against the "false religion" of Islam with the aim of destroying it, and even claimed that America founded to destroy Islam. We're noting it because nobody at the MRC seems to have an interest in doing so.
