The church attended by US presidential hopeful Barack Obama has dismissed criticism of its senior pastor over comments he made on race and US policy.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright said in 2001 that the 9/11 attacks were like “chickens coming home to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2684".
After the remarks resurfaced Obama denounced them as “incendiary” and “completely http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3811".
But now the church says the attacks on Rev Wright have been made by “external forces” that want to “vilify us”.
In a statement released on Sunday, the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago compared the criticism to the assassination of Martin Luther http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3577.
“Nearly three weeks before the 40th commemoration anniversary of the murder of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr”, the statement said, “the Rev Jeremiah A Wright Jr’s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe”.
Rev Wright brought http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3795, officiated at his wedding and baptised his daughters.The Democratic presidential hopeful said he had not been present during the sermon at which the pastor made the comments, and that he had looked to Rev Wright for spiritual, not political, guidance.
“I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies,” he wrote.
‘God damn America’
In a sermon on the Sunday after the attacks of 11 September 2001, Rev Wright told his congregation: “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 to our own front yards.
“America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
In a 2003 sermon, Rev Wright said blacks should condemn the United States.
From Western Voices reader A.L.: Reverend Wright’s hypocrisy is mind-boggling. He damns America for “treating it’s citizens as less than human” while his fellow people in Africa, to whom he claims to relate so much, constantly rape and kill women and children, viciously slaughter each other, and forcibly recruit children as slaves and soldiers. And Reverend Wright has the gall to damn America? Amazing.