“A Call for Justice and Repair”
By Cliff Kincaid
Barrack Obama’s pastor not only spews anti-American rhetoric from the pulpit but favors shaking down U.S. taxpayers for “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=589 was the keynote speaker at the 2007 annual conference of N’COBRA, which stands for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.
Wright’s talk, “A Call for Justice and Repair,” followed a statement in which he declared that “The Biblical principle of true http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1466 is that the offended party is given compensation to make up for that which has been stolen from them, the losses that have been inflicted upon them and their families.”
A http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=379’ pockets.But Wright isn’t the only controversial member of Obama’s church. Dr. Iva Carruthers, who describes herself as an active member of the church, is an outspoken advocate of reparations for blacks and was a participant in N’COBRA’s 2004 conference.
Carruthers was identified, along with Wright, as a member of Obama’s African American Religious Leadership Committee. Wright has since been dropped from the group. But Carruthers is sometimes referred to as a spokesman for Wright and works with him closely.
Indeed, Carruthers may be even more controversial, especially on the issue of reparations. She wrote The Church and Reparations¯An African American Perspective, which was reportedly “distributed by her denomination” at the 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The conference was considered so extreme that the U.S. delegation, led by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, walked out.
Not only are members of his church involved in the reparations movement; Obama is said to have been politically close to former Chicago Alderman Dorothy Jean Wright Tillman, who led an effort by the Chicago City Council to demand reparations for slavery. “Chicago has become the de facto center of the slavery reparations movement,” noted a journalist for the far-left In These Times.
The Obamas’ just-released 2006 income tax return shows that they gave $22,500 to Trinity United Church of Christ, which they attended with such figures as Wright and Carruthers.
Despite going to the same church, however, Carruthers told me that she has no idea as to where Obama stands on the controversy. “I don’t have any insight at all,” she said, before saying that she had to leave for another engagement.
Carruthers is the General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, which includes Wright on its board and describes itself as a social justice organization. The website of the group includes a statement that “Dr. Wright represents the best among us, one of the best in this tribe of prophetic preachers. He has made his church a place where one could express the centuries-old pain of being Black in America, while finding strength for a brighter day. An attack on this man of the God is an attack on all those of the cloth who believe in the social Gospel of liberation.”
Both Wright and Carruthers were involved in the Illinois Transatlantic Slave Trade Commission, established by the Illinois State Legislature in 2005. Its purpose was to examine the “past and present effects on African-Americans” of the slave trade and it issued a report in 2007. Wright was an “associate” of the commission while Carruthers was the “senior research consultant.”
Its findings included that Christopher Columbus was part of the Catholic Church’s “century of blood” in the establishment of the slave trade system, and that civil war U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, acknowledged to be “the most famous son of Illinois,” didn’t morally object to slavery but only wanted to “restore the Union to white consensus.”
In 2003, Carruthers spoke on behalf of Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ at a “summit on reparations” opened by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Another group represented at the Farrakhan summit was the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), which seeks the creation of a black nation in the U.S. in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
In 2007, Carruthers endorsed a document urging that “Financial and human resources be identified and made available, in trust and otherwise, with appropriate church, community, and academic entities to effect institutional development and remedies from the Transatlantic slave trade system and colonialism at the local, national and global levels.” The document said that reparations should be “offered for the healing of peoples who were once enslaved.”
Like Obama, Carruthers and Wright have been deeply involved in African affairs. They traveled to the “motherland,” as they call it, where Wright was photographed in http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=863 in “full ceremonial regalia” as a “development chief” and Carruthers was elevated to the position of “queen mother.” Obama’s wearing of African garb became a national controversy.
But the more important issue, from a public policy perspective, is how he would handle taxpayer dollars.
http://www.smallgovtimes.com/story/08mar27.obama.reparations/index.html