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Obama Includes Controversial Ministers
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has launched a religious outreach Web site that contains testimonials from three controversial clerics — including a minister who blames 9/11 on the U.S. The three are Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago; Rev. J. Alfred Smith Sr., senior pastor of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif.; and Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest in Chicago. Reacting to Sunday’s launch of the Web site, www.faith.barackobama.com, Catholic League President Bill Donohue declared: "Rev. Wright was scheduled to give the invocation at the forum of Obama’s presidential announcement on February 10, but the night before the event Obama rescinded the bid: The Illinois senator knew that his spiritual advisor was so divisive that he would cloud the ceremonies. "The black liberation theologian has a record of giving racially inflammatory sermons and has even said that Zionism has an element of ‘white racism.’ He also blamed the attacks of 9/11 on American foreign policy.”
Story Continues Below Readers of NewsMax magazine’s May issue already knew of the connection between Wright and Obama — and Oprah Winfrey as well. The issue’s cover story, "Obama and the Oprah Factor,” disclosed that Wright served as a "spiritual mentor” to a young Obama, and Obama wrote on the church’s Web site that while kneeling in the church: "I submitted myself to [God’s] will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth.” Obama has said that the title of his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope,” came from a Wright sermon. The story also revealed that Oprah Winfrey attended services at Wright’s church after she moved to Chicago in 1984. Donohue had this to say about the other two clerics on Obama’s site: "Rev. Smith was honored by the notoriously violent Black Panther Party of Oakland in 1975, and in 1990 was given a community award by the Nation of Islam, an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-gay group. "Rev. Pfleger has allowed Nation of Islam chief Louis Farrakhan to preach in his church; he has been arrested for defacing billboards; he has paid prostitutes to worship at his church; and only last week he staged an anti-gun rally in front of a gun store where he exhorted the crowd to hunt down the owner ‘like a rat’ and ‘snuff’ him.” Donohue added: "While Obama is not responsible for the record of these three clergymen, he is responsible for giving them the opportunity to prominently display their testimonials on his religious outreach Web site. If these are the kinds of clergymen he admires, perhaps it’s best he shut down his new Web site and start all over again. It will take more than ‘God talk’ to get Obama out of this jam.”
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
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