My family and I immigrated to the United States from Canada and settled in Florida in 1996. In order to establish roots and connect with our new community and society we joined a Reform Jewish Temple in Boca Raton, where we had bought a home. There were many instances that we did not agree with the ideology of the majority of the congregation as it was more liberal than we were, but we enjoyed many other things about the Temple. We chose to enjoy the good and to ignore and discard that which we didn’t like. After all, nothing is perfect.
In March 2006, Hamas won an election in newly-unoccupied Gaza, shocking much of the world. Hamas is an Iran-backed Shia Muslim terror organization whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel. Meanwhile in America, 387 Rabbis signed a petition urging President Bush to not discontinue foreign aid funding to Hamas in order to facilitate “dialogue”. Two of the four Rabbis at our Temple were signatories to that petition. In my view, any money sent to Hamas would be used for weapons or for suicide bombers to attack Israel and kill innocent Israelis. Simply put, these Rabbis were advocating for America to fund the murder of Jews. I found this to be if not repugnant, mortally naive. This Temple stood for something that was diametrically opposed to those things we believed in. We resigned our membership. We left.
Senator Barrack Obama was in a situation not dissimilar to my own. He was (still is) a member of a church where the Pastor has delivered many sermons which were extremist, incendiary, treasonous, bigoted and racist. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright sermonized that “white America” invented the AIDS virus to kill blacks; He claims America deserved 9/11, that it was just “the chickens coming home to roost”, perhaps because America supported Israel, the evil terrorizer of the Palestinians. Rev. Wright has made many other vile statements that we have all heard by now. Rev. Wright admired and honored the anti-Semite racist Louis Farakkahn with a church award. It is absolutely impossible that Senator Obama did not know what the Rev. Jeremiah Wright stood for, having been a member of that church for TWENTY YEARS! Obama knew of the lunatic ranting, he likely heard it, and he stayed at Trinity United Church regardless. Is it illogical to infer that Senator Obama stood for the same things (until we all found out)?
Senator Obama recently delivered an eloquent speech telling us about racism from many different angles. This was pure excuse-making, equivocation and spin. Nowhere did he condemn Rev. Wright for black supremacist racism. Nowhere did Obama apologize to Americans for being part of this. Nowhere did he say that he should have left Trinity United Church. He said he could no more disown Rev. Wright than he could his racist white grandmother. That is a lie. We cannot choose our grandparents but we can choose our synagogues, our churches, our spiritual leaders. And besides, Obama’s grandmother did not deliver fiery rants from a pulpit before frenzied crowds like Jeremiah Wright did. If Senator Obama was a man of moral integrity and had a bit of courage, he could have – and should have – left his congregation just like I left mine.
It is a fair discussion whether Senator Barrack Obama has poor judgement or whether he is simply a liar. In either case, he is absolutely undeserving and totally unfit to be President of ALL Americans.
