Obamas pastor och media

Jag har följt den amerikanska valrörelsen med visst intresse. Barack Obama har gjort ett gott intryck och hans budskap om ett hopp om ett annat USA kan förhoppningsvis innebära en förändring.

På senare tid har Obama fått problem med gamla uttalanden som pastorn i hans församling har gjort. Gång efter gång har nyhetsmedia som Foxnews, CBS och ABC visat är pastorn fördömer USA och dessutom påstår att 11:e september är en konsekvens av USA:s utrikespolitik (vilket anses var helt orimligt, eftersom alla vet att det handlar om avundsjuka och blint hat).

Här är ett inslag från ABC news som beskriver det hela.


Fox News försöker ge pastorn en chans att förklara sig, eller...


En fördjupad analys av vad pastorn sa följer, även den på Fox News.


Jag tycker att det är nästan komiskt hur dålig denna journalistik är. Som tittare blir jag bara trött av allt pladder och sakfrågan dränks totalt i det hätska tonläget, som verkar i det närmaste frammanat för att misskreditera den som ska försvara pastorns uttalande.

Som kontrast kan man se en timmeslång intervju på PBS som har en helt annan approach.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/watch.html

Om man inte orkar se hela intervjun så kommer här några utdrag ur den, där man kan läsa vad pastorn sa och hans egna ord om vad han menade.

Från predikan 2003:

REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT (SERMON TAPE): Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I'm through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate - the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!

BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?

REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie. And when we start talking about my government right or wrong, I don't think that goes. That is consistent with what the will of God says or the word of God says that governments don't say right or wrong. That governments that wanna kill innocents are not consistent with the will of God. And that you are made in the image of God, you're not made in the image of any particular government. We have the freedom here in this country to talk about that publicly, whereas some other places, you're dead if say the wrong thing about your government.
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Från predikan 16 september 2001

REVEREND WRIGHT (SERMON TAPE): The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the king, those soldiers who slaughtered his son and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned the towns, burned the temples, burned the towers, and moved from the hatred for armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents, the babies, the babies . "Blessed are they who dash your baby's brains against a rock." And that my beloved is a dangerous place to be. Yet, that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don't care who gets hurt in the process.
I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox news. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox news commentators to no end. He pointed out. You see him John? A white man he pointed out -an Ambassador! He pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true. America's chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his child. "Blessed are they who bash your children's head against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians - not soldiers - people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. A White Ambassador said that y'all not a Black Militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism. An Ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who's trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised--

BILL MOYERS: You preached that sermon on the Sunday after 9-11 -- almost 7 years ago. When people saw the sound bites from it this year, they were upset because you seemed to be blaming America. Did you somehow fail to communicate?

REVEREND WRIGHT: The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly. What is not the failure to communicate is when something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public. That's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they wanna do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a "wack-a-doodle." It's to paint me as something. Something's wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with this country. There's -its policies. We're perfect. We-our hands are free. Our hands have no blood on them. That's not a failure to communicate. The message that is being communicated by the sound bites is exactly what those pushing those sound bites want to communicate.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they wanted to communicate?

REVEREND WRIGHT: I think they wanted to communicate that I am- unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And, by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint? That's what they wanted to communicate. They know nothing about the church. They know nothing about our prison ministry. They know nothing about our food share ministry. They know nothing about our senior citizens home. They know nothing about all we try to do as a church and have tried to do, and still continue to do as a church that believes what Martin Marty said, that the two worlds have to be together-the world before church and the world after postlude. And that the gospel of Jesus Christ has to speak to those worlds, not only in terms of the preached message on a Sunday morning but in terms of the lived-out ministry throughout the week.

Säga vad man vill men Wright är en pastor i Martin Luther Kings anda, han är inte nöjd med sitt USA, han verkar knappt dela religion med sin president.

Som bakgrund till pastorns missnöje med “det vita USA” är fängelsestatistiken talande:

Med 2,3 miljoner invånare i fängelse toppar USA listan över världens länder, både när det gäller absoluta antal fångar och fängslade per capita. Folkrika Kina kommer på andra plats. Detta enligt en studie gjord av ett oberoende undersökningsföretag som publiceras i Washington Post på fredagen.Undersökningen visar att en stor del av de fängslade är svarta. Bland annat sitter en av nio svarta män mellan 20 och 34 år inlåsta för olika brott. För svarta kvinnor i gruppen 35-39 är siffran en på hundra vilket ska jämföras med en på 355 för vita kvinnor i samma åldersgrupp.

Osaklig media måste göra det svårt att bedriva en konstruktiv valrörelse i USA. Det hopplösa snuttifierandet måste göra det hart när omöjligt att blida sig en grundad uppfattning om de viktiga frågorna. Förhoppningsvis är antalet amerikaner som trotts detta försöker sätta sig in i ödesfrågorna tillräckligt många…