Sarah Palin and Her Cultured Despisers

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska

In the City of New York, the enlightened are smarter, more cultured, more couth than the Governor of Alaska. The woman is a redneck ! Could you find her at MOMA ? Could you see her reading The New Yorker ? Or, for that matter, The New York Times ? Would you find her at a parents' meeting of Brooklyn Friends ? None of the above, obviously.

And she is not an Episcopalian, not a Reform Jew, not a member of Ethical Culture. She does not attend mass at St. Patrick's. Her religious affiliation, Pentecostalism, can be found in Spanish Harlem, but since when is that part of New York, part of Culture ?

Way back in 1799, the German theologian Schleiermacher had a message for the "cultured" of his time. But did this put an end to mindless, ignorant, snobbish judgmentalism ? What do you think ?

Friedrich Schleiermacher, author of
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799)

The ideology of Trinity United

Stanley Kurtz

The ideology of Trinity United, the Chicago church in which Obama was an active member for twenty years, is not at all representative of Black churches. It is a strictly minority view in Black American Christianity. It is the brain child of the radical "Black Liberation" theologian James Cone of Union Theological Seminary with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as his most prominent disciple. "Black Liberation Christianity" proclaims that Jesus was Black, that only Black Christianity is authentically Christian, that White Christians should be ashamed of their skin color, and so forth .

The black intellectual's goal, says Cone, is to "aid in the destruction of America as he knows it." Such destruction requires both black anger and white guilt. The black-power theologian's goal is to tell the story of American oppression so powerfully and precisely that white men will "tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil." In the preface to his 1970 book, A Black Theology of Liberation, Wright wrote: "There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: 'How can we become black?'"

This quotation is from a thorough explanation of Black Liberation theology by Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz's piece, in my view, is absolutely required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the folks that Obama worked with for those twenty years. Click here to get the full text.

Barack and the Sonim

Washington Post

mlive.com

Bill Ayers by edexcellence.net

My neighborhood -- Downtown and Brownstone Brooklyn -- is graced by diversity of commercial and religious enterprise. Restaurants of high and low quality, stores (ditto), and of course people. So it's not surprising that you can buy, no trouble at all, copies of the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," both in the street from vendors and from a number of bookstores.

Now one of these stores that has featured this work in its shop window has just begun to display a great big sign: Obama Needs You, Sign Up to Help as Volunteer, or words to that effect. This particular store is run by "Afrocentric" sonim, haters of Jews. (There is now an absolutely hair-raising account of "Afrocentric" sonim at Wellesley College, of all places, by Mary Lefkowitz: "History Lesson.")

I do not for one minute believe that Obama shares the views of these sonim, nor do I think that he would be aware of what they do in his name. But, as I have pointed out before on this blog, it is a curious fact that haters of Israel and of the Jews endorse him. Why ? Do they know something that the rest of us don't ?

By and large, the media and even the McCain campaign have given Obama a free pass on his twenty years in a Church of Hate and on his connections with other extremists. Now Commentary Magazine, God bless it, has broken this silence and has published a comprehensive (almost) account of these matters in an article by Joshua Muravchik in its latest issue.

I do not endorse the doctrines and dogmas of Commentary, which to some extent inform this article. Nevertheless, I think that the factual account is sound (except that it leaves out, surprisingly, the Hamas connection with Trinity United Church). I do hope that the article will find the readership it deserves. Some material on Obama's connection with the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers, for example, has not been widely known before.