HOW OBAMA'S CHURCH AND PASTOR LINK TO THE ISM

How Obama’s church and associates link him to the ISM
By Lee Kaplan


Some media pundits have tried suggesting that Barack Obama’s recent speech about his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago is comparable to the Gettysburg Address in calling for national “unity.”



But if one parses some key statements by Obama in that speech, one can see how Obama poses more of a threat of creating disunity in America and how he will probably use racism as a vehicle do so.



Some liberal Jewish groups have begun an email campaign trying to persuade American Jews concerned by Jeremiah Wright’s comparison of the black American experience with that of the Palestinians in the Middle East as not being compatible with Barack Obama’s views. Led by Democratic Florida Congressman Robert Wexler (D) Florida, Obama’s Jewish supporters have claimed that after meeting with members of AIPAC, the Israel Lobby, Obama stated that the Palestinians must renounce the right of return, the Catch 22 used by the PLO and its front group, the International Solidarity Movement, that prevents a ny other solution to the Middle East conflict other than the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state. In addition, the email claims, Obama stated that the missiles fired on Sderot are unacceptable and that Israel should have a right to defend itself. But that same email also contains the tired (and untrue) old leftist platitudes that so many Israelis would not have been murdered by Arab terrorists since Oslo were it not for the Likud Party in Israel that has refused to give away unconditionally Israel’s security in exchange for empty promises from the terrorist warlords in Fatah and Hamas. Both terrorist groups agree in Arabic the only acceptable real end game is the dismantling of the Jewish state, something that is always glossed over by lefties when someone euphemistically talks about “peace.” “Peace” to the Arabs is newspeak for Israel becoming Palestine.



Obama’s statements, were, for the untrained ears of pampered Jewish leftists in the Democratic Party what might be classified as being “so far so good.”



However, without losing a beat, an article has appeared on the ISM affiliated website Electronic Intifada (EI) by one of its co-founders, Ali Abunimah, in which Abumimah recounts his close past working relationship with Obama prior to the presidential campaign and how Abunimah believes Obama is merely giving lip service to the Jewish community to get elected, and that once in office he will work for the Palestinian cause. Abunimah lists himself and is mentioned in subsequent Obama articles in the mainstream press merely as a “Palestinian activist.” Abunimah insists that Obama will “come around” once elected.< /SPAN>



But Ali Abunimah is more than just some “Palestinian activist” based in Chicago, the same location as Reverend Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ. He is, in fact, one of the founders of the fiercely anti-Semitic ISM Arab group Al Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition. Abunimah is a high level international leader of the ISM for the Arabs who travels extensively between Chicago, Europe and Ramallah.



Al Awda in Arabic means “The Return,” and the group not only calls for the complete destruction of Israel, even denying Israel’s current existence on its website and urging boycotts against not only Israelis, but American Jews and their businesses, but also calls for specifically supporting Arab terrorists in Iraq who kill US soldiers. Among its more than 130 chapters across the US and Canada, Al Awda’s New Jersey chapter is led by a young woman named Charlotte Kates who has called Israeli children killed by suicide bombers “fair game.” The ISM’s Al Awda openly supports terrorism as “legitimate resistance” in ISM revolutionary lingo.



Al Awda’s anti-Semitism has also linked to neo-Nazi groups in promoting the boycott and divestment from Israel on American campuses and in the US business community. It became so virulent that the group was booted by the UC Riverside campus administration from holding an international conference on that campus last year. Ali Abunimah, even today, is featured on the Al Awda website supporting terrorism against Israelis because he considers that “nonviolence is overrated.”

In short, Obama saw no problem being lobbied in the past by someone who openly promotes terrorism and discrimination against Jewish-Americans.



Al Awda is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe of the creation of Israel) this coming May thanks to the willingness of the management of Hilton Hotels to overlook anti-Semitism in its facilities to make a buck. A new petition is in the works to get Hilton to stop this. Al Awda’s scheduled guest of honor will be a PFLP terrorist member named Khalida Jarrar , and their website recently gave an homage to the late PFLP founder George Habash. Al Awda wants convicted Islamic Jihad financier/terr orist Sami al Arian released, a murderer of over 100 people abroad, some of them Americans, from terrorist attacks.





If Barack Obama didn’t know about Abunimah’s writings (and Abunimah says he did), the same as his claims of being unaware of Reverend Wright’s remarks after 20 years, then Obama is not competent to be our President. Abunimah likes to lie and claim Al Awda has nothing to do with the ISM or Electronic Intifada, though plenty of evidence exists on the website the homepage at www.StoptheISM.com showing the contrary.



But Obama’s association with the ISM through his church and lobbying in Chicago goes even deeper than just his past links to Al Awda and Ali Abunimah. His pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and the Trinity Union Church of Christ in Chicago, are both equally involved with the ISM.



Since 2001, the ISM has been tasked by the PLO and other Arab irredentist groups with getting new generations of American college kids to consider democratic Israel as somehow a violator of human rights, all the while as the Palestinian Arabs who practice open anti-Semitism, honor killings, and the murders of their own people as well as Jews, as commendable practices. At their 2003 national organizing conference at Ohio State, ISM activists set out to deconstruct American narratives about Israel as a democratic state with firm support from secular radical Americans of Jewish ancestry. In one workshop set up to discuss ways to put a good face on suicide bombings, ISM activists spoke of new ways of reinterpreting the Bible so Israel did not belong to the Jews, but to the Palest inians.



In working with the Saudi funded Muslim Students Association in campuses across the US, the ISM has managed to cloud the image among American youth through disinformation and propaganda campaigns against Jews and Israel in order to try and make American students believe Israel is an apartheid state like South Africa was in the 1980’s. At the same time, these same Palestinian groups like Al Awda insist the West Bank and Gaza must be Jew-free. Since this campaign has been largely successful in organizing anti-Israel attitudes on campuses all over America, and since Jewish organizations in America have been slow to react, the ISM moved on to another program to do the same thing only this time alienating US churches, particularly evangelical churches that have a long-term sense of Biblical support for the Jewish state. Thus was born the Sabeel Ecum enical Liberation Theological Society created as part of the ISM to do in US churches what various ISM groups succeeded to do in American colleges.



At the same time, a foothold already existed to a small degree in the American black religious community such as is led by Louis Farrakhan.



The mainstream ISM leadership is made up of Palestinian Christian Arabs who are also communists/anarchists and pan-Arab nationalists first, that hold to the philosophy of the Popular Front for The Liberation of Palestine, the second largest faction of the PLO. Using communist revolutionary practices of “solidarity,” it has been these Palestinian Arab Christian “revolutionaries,” aligned with Jewish- American communists and anarchists, that have been working so well on the campuses in the US and the UK.



Now, it has become the ISM’s time to deconstruct religious dogma of Israel belonging to the Jews as is preached in US churches and to increase the number black churches in America that are working in “solidarity” with this program. Jeremiah Wright’s church is one of them. Even though the national synod of the United Church for Christ rescinded a boycott and divestment plan against Israel, a wing of the UCC church keeps trying to get it reinstated. That wing includes Reverend Wright’s Trinity UCC Church in Chicago. Few people know also, that there are many Muslim members of Reverend Wright’s “Christian” church, a close ally of Sabeel.



Led by a Palestinian Christian pastor named Naim Ateek, Sabeel’s purpose is as part of the ISM to especially convince churches in America that the diminishing Christian population in the West Bank, particularly Bethlehem, is not due to persecution by the Muslim majority in the Palestinian Authority against Christians caused Christian flight, but because of Israel’s Jews and “the occupation.” In order to achieve this, Sabeel practices something called “replacement theology “ which aligns itself closely with the ideas of its Muslim fundamentalist allies.


Replacement theology advanced by the ISM and Sabeel holds that Jesus was not a Jew, but a Palestinian. It also holds that the fulfillment of scripture is not Jews returning to the land of Israel, but Palestinian Arabs taking control of Israel from Jewish oppressors to become Palestine. In replacement theology, Abraham’s son, Isaac, was not to be sacrificed before God, but it was rather Ishmael, the father of the Arab people. This is also the Muslim interpretation of the Torah in the Koran. Yasser Arafat always claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian, not a Jew. Arafat, though a secular Muslim, also saw the value of his allies in the PFLP in recruiting pan-Arab revolutionaries and Arab communists to achieve his goals.



Why should a Christian Arab pastor like Naim Ateek teach such things? He does so because his religious teachings are based more on politics than anything else, and it gives him a power base and funding as a religious leader he could only dream of among the Christian Arab minority population.



Sabeel has been actively working in cooperation with Chicago’s Trinity UCC among certain other politically active churches in America to promote anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic beliefs that can erode American Christian support for Israel and hasten Israel’s destruction. And Pastor Jeremiah Wright, pandering to his majority black congregation, has been teaching his own replacement theology, only this time its called “black replacement theology.” Jesus was not a Jew, says Wright, but a “black man.” Trinity UCC’s relationship with the anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (funded by anti-Israel Libya) fits in nicely with this formula also. The Christian religious icon is no longer a Jew, but a black man and to accept this interpretation is the way to salvation for the black man. This not only deconstructs

American church views of the legitimacy of Israel, but has a nice foothold with the likes of the Nation of Islam in the US black community.



In his speech, Obama actually tried to give some credibility to Wright’s speech claiming it portrays the real experience for black Americans without saying what specific parts of Wright’s diatribes he was referring to. By accusing the US of bombing innocent people of color at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of America infecting black American with AIDS, or of “chickens coming home to roost” for 9/11 (ignoring that plenty of black Americans died in those attacks), were more than just blanket “issues” that Obama called them and said he does not agree with “totally.”



But does this all really link back to Obama? Can’t he still get by, saying that his pastor Wright and church of 20 years, and Ali Abunimah also do not bespeak his personal opinions?



To the contrary, in his speech about Wright, Obama said he does believe such things when he said he cannot disavow them from Reverend Wright or disassociate himself from the demagogical pastor any more than from the black community. He just did it in veiled language. He just spoke about his close family-like relationship with Wright and then suggested Wright speaks to the black experience in America.



Here is the most important parsed line from Obama’s speech (and it’s no Gettysburg Address):



“The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor.”



So the man who “introduced” Barack Obama to his “Christian faith” also teaches that Jesus was not a Jew, and that the white Jews exploited the “black Palestinians” in the Bible, and who espouses ISM and Sabeel religious terminology among his fellow Christians, particularly blacks, even against the wishes of his own synod.

Jeremiah Wright certainly knows his market.



That is the Christianity of Jeremiah Wright and based on Obama’s speech, the same Christianity that Wright introduced Obama to, and one the presidential candidate still believes and won’t disavow no matter what it costs him.



True, Obama mentioned how Wright taught him to be kind unto others. But according to Wright’s interpretation, that “kindness” has more to do with fighting “white oppression” than urging nonviolence and brotherly love among all races. Wright’s church even praised Hamas in the past, and has always touted it as an Islamic charity organization showing such social kindness despite its charter calling for unyielding murder and expulsion of Jews in the Middle East.



The ISM’s training manual says that international ISM volunteers in the West Bank should not tell people they are human shields for terrorist groups but “peace activists” because it deceives people from their real purpose of attacking Israel any way they can to the benefit of their Palestinian handlers. So, too, does Barack Obama talk about loving one another as taught to him by a pastor who then accuses America of murdering innocent people of color at Hiroshima and Nagasaki over 50 years ago. The American servicemen whose lives were spared back then by ending the war quickly were also black men, Latinos and others who were fighting Japanese racists who murdered Chinese, Filipinos a nd other “inferior” people on a regular basis, who ran experimental death camps for American and British prisoners-of-war, and who were allied with a Nazi Germany that was allied with the same Arab nationalist leadership that is still trying to destroy the Jews today.



“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” said Obama. So then it is clear that Obama believes that Wright’s ideas represent the black community and black experience in America when they represent only the radicalized fringe of black America that wants to aid America’s enemies abroad. It is doubtful many black Americans who served proudly in the US military feel the same as Wright on this issue.


What is more, militant Islamists see a potential to sow internal problems and promote their fascist goals in the US by trying to divide the American black community against the US government. Whereas blacks have been exploited in the past, this is now seen as a way to achieve the goals of expanding the Muslim ummah inside the US from in the Middle East. That is why Libya gives money to Farrakhan and why the ISM and Sabeel work with Reverend Wright whose personal interpretations of Christianity are entrenched in Obama’s mind as the True Word of Christianity. Wri ght actually visited Mohammar Ghaddafi in Libya with Farrakhan in the past.



I attended an AIPAC (Israel lobby) conference two years ago where another black candidate for congress, Barbara Lee (D) Oakland, was in attendance as the representative for Oakland/Berkeley. Ms. Lee sat very respectfully as she was fawned over by a crowd of Jewish Israel supporters and acted as if she was really concerned about Israel. Ms. Lee even smiled at me personally as she left. Meanwhile, she was the only member of Congress who voted against going after Bin Laden after 9/11 in Afghanistan and also supports groups like Hamas, Hizballah and Al Awda in their anti-Semitic goals. Congressman Wexler needs to understand that what Obama says to a meeting of Jews will not translate into what he does o nce he is in office. In that regard, Ali Abunimah of Al Awda is probably right about Obama going to work for the Palestinians once in office Obama’s staffers certainly suggest the same.



The question is if we want a man in the White House who will regularly give his ear to the likes of a Reverend Wright, his and Sabeel’s replacement theologies, and pro-terrorist propagandists like Ali Abunimah on a regular basis? In one sense, Obama could be considered the ISM’s Manchurian candidate.

HILTON SIDES WITH TERRORISTS--AGAIN

Last year I got Al Awda's international conference kicked off the UC Riverside campus by revealing the blatant anti-Semitism and links to neo-Nazis by the Arab irredentist group. Al Awda went to Embassy Suites in Garden Grove instead. Now they are planning to stage the same event again at the same location with open arms by Embassy Suites manager Dominic Acolino. Al Awda is already mentioning they have invited a PFLP terrorist and others involved with Hamas. Stay tuned for a boycott petition against Hilton coming up.

UC BERKELEY BECOMES SAUDI U

Why am I not surprised?

A committee of CAL's academic senate has approved UC Berkeley opening a satellite branch of the University in Saudi Arabia. On the same campus that disallows the student store to sell certain clothing or Nike products because they are allegedly produced in sweat shops overseas, sees no problem in giving its name to the medieval feudal kingdom of Saudi Arabia that still practives slavery, misogyny, child abuse, religious intolerance and other human rights violations (not to mention not allowing Jews inside the country).Currently, I'm trying to find out who was on the academic committee because I'll bet it is made up of Arab professors from UC Berkeley's Center for Middle East Studies (also funded by the Saudis).

More on this later, but check out our petition at www.DAFKA.org that requires unviersities in the US to divest from and not accept any money from the Evil Kingdom.