http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2008/04/05/5201166-sun.php
By SALIM MANSUR
smansurca@yahoo.ca
Senator Barack Hussein Obama's speech in
Philadelphia on race had one urgent purpose. It was to stop the train wreck of his campaign for the U.S. presidency as words
and pictures of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, damning America got across to the
electorate.
His speech was well-crafted and skillfully
delivered sending the mainstream liberal-left media over the top as Joe Klein of Time magazine did in hailing it to be a "triumph."
Obama probably saved his candidacy for the
Democratic Party's nomination in August at Denver, Col., by implicating just about everyone around him for having something
to do with the torrent of hate-filled sermons his pastor poured regularly over his congregation on Sundays on the South Side
of Chicago.
In Obama's telling, he had heard his pastor
"use incendiary language" denigrating the "greatness and goodness of our nation." But given the history of slavery in America,
his pastor regrettably remained imperfect, like the country, with some distance to go in making the perfect union the American
constitution heralds.
Hence, Obama spoke about what ails America
and how his candidacy -- though imperfect, given his personal story -- offers Americans hope to draw nearer to the aspirations
held forth by the founding fathers.
I doubt if "middle" America -- patriotic,
proud, fiercely independent and straight-talking -- will give Obama the pass on his long and fluid speech to explain away,
by use of history, the evil ranting of his pastor.
For what Obama did not do, nor could do, despite his rhetorical skill, is
tell the American people he walked out on Wright and TUCC once he learned how deeply soaked his pastor was in the sort of
theology out of which Afro-American race-baiters have made their career at a terrible social cost to the black community in
the U.S.
In leaving Wright and TUCC behind a long time ago without public notice and
the media glare would have required simple courage that Obama -- if the public were to accept the mainstream liberal-left
media's glorification of him -- possessed.
On the contrary, Obama courted Wright, drew support from him among his followers
and only denounced him after his bigotry became public knowledge.
Would walking out on Wright and TUCC have been difficult? Perhaps, it would.
But accepting anything less from Obama would be indulging in the bigotry of low expectation when his many media friends have
packaged him as a rare politician of immense guts and decency.
I stopped going to mosques in my home town after 9/11 -- as many other Muslims
did in their quiet manner without seeking public attention -- and severed relations with "official" Islam and its spokesmen
who are the most egregious practitioners of bigotry with their hate-filled language that fuels violence.
The cost for me was liberating as I distanced myself from folks who preach
a war-mongering ideology masquerading as a religion.
Obama's pastor is a mere sophomore when it comes to the Friday tirades of
Islamist imams denouncing and damning America, Israel, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims who reject their lies and venom.
The Wright controversy has revealed Obama as just another self-serving politician,
though gifted with a silver-tongue, and only the incredulous will view him as statesman bearing a transformative vision of
a new age.
You can e-mail article author Salim Mansur
at smansurca@yahoo.ca
