(Introduction by David Mark Greaves)
That Fox News is counting too heavily on how well the dumbing-down of the American people is going can be seen with the appearance of the entire sermon from which Fox had extracted a fiery “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” to go with other sermon extractions, to create an uproar about Obama’s “un-American” and “racist” pastor Jeremiah Wright.
What has happened is that Fox has fallen victim to the “Law of Unintended Consequences.” First, Obama’s response on the subject of race is being seen as an example of leadership that has never before been exhibited by a presidential candidate. Second, with the release of the entire sermon being available on YouTube, Fox has poisoned its own well, continuing the ongoing mirth their “Fair &Balanced” slogan provides.
Reverend Wright was quoting Ambassador Edward Peck, Ret., a white, career U.S. diplomat who served 32 years in the U.S. Foreign Service and was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter. About a third of the way into a sermon on “Self-examination,” Reverend Wright begins the following:
“I want to share with you one of my ‘faith footnotes.’ Visitors often give faith footnotes so that our members don’t lose sight of the big picture. Turn to your neighbor and say ‘Faith Footnote.’
“I heard ambassador [Edward] Peck on an interview yesterday on Fox News, did anyone see him? This is a White man. And he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad is 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, Arapahoe, the Navaho. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease. And kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Granada and killed innocents and non military personnel. We bombed the Black civilian community of Panama with Stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers. We bombed Qadaffi’s home and killed his child. (Blessed are they who bash your childrens’ head against a rock).
We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hardworking people. Mothers and fathers who left home that day not knowing they would not get back. We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We nuked more than that in New York or the Pentagon and we never batted and 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 is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost. Violence begets violence, hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism.
“White ambassador said that ya’ll, not a Black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them and we need to come to grips with that. Let me stop my faith footnote right there and you think about that over the next few days. Now turn to your neighbor and say ‘Footnote is over’.”
