Jewish World Review March 20, 2008 / 13 Adar II 5768

In search of a true black uniter

By Jack Kelly

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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The first black president of the United States is more likely to be someone like Allen West than Sen. Barack Obama, thanks chiefly to Brian Ross of ABC News.

Mr. Ross is an illustration of the impact an honest journalist can have — if he or she works for a major television news network. The "Good Morning America" program March 13 broadcast a four minute report by Mr. Ross on the rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Obama's pastor.

Mr. Ross is a skilled investigative reporter, but he didn't need to break a sweat to break this story. The information about Rev. Wright's anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic rants was readily available. Radio/television talk show host Sean Hannity had been flogging the story for more than a year. But the "mainstream" media didn't pay attention — until Mr. Ross' broadcast made the story too big to ignore.

"Political reporters and editors were inundated with emails from red state friends and relatives wanting to know why the brouhaha wasn't getting more instant and constant coverage from every news outlet," wrote Mike Allen of the Politico.

Many in the news media were uncomfortable reporting the story, preferring to use paraphrases and euphemisms to describe Rev. Wright's sermons, rather than his own words. The New York Times has yet to report that he urged blacks to sing "G-d Damn America." But first prize in the euphemism department goes to Wall Street Journal reporters Suzanne Sataline and Douglas Belkin, who described the sermons at Trinity United Church of Christ as "blunt, funny and often fiery."

"Blunt, funny, and often fiery." I don't think that's how most of us would describe sermons declaring America got what it deserved on 9/11; that there is no difference between America and al Qaida; that this is the "US of KKKA;" that the U.S. government invented the AIDs virus to wipe out people of color.

Journalists want to paint a kinder, gentler portrait of Jeremiah Wright than his own words do. But video of his sermons is on the Web; tens of thousands have viewed them, and most are wondering how someone who sat silently in the pews listening to this racist drivel can be the racial healer white Americans are longing for.

"Nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable," wrote Shelby Steele, himself a product of a mixed marriage.

I don't think the controversy will prevent Sen. Obama from winning the Democratic nomination. More than a few white Democrats hate America, too, and many more are terrified of offending blacks. The general election is another story. Sen. Obama's oratorical skills cannot remove the tarnish from his carefully cultivated image as a post-racial uniter.

White America's search for a racial healer will go on. We yearn to support a black man who is proud of both his ethnic heritage and his country. Which brings me to Allen West.

"The flag that will one day drape my casket is not a rag to be burned in some semblance of self-expression," said Mr. West, 46, a retired Army lieutenant colonel turned public school teacher, in an interview last year. "I like to sing the national anthem...and I detest self-loathing. It's a cancer I cannot tolerate."

"The West family is an example of the triumph of the civil rights movement, as well as Ronald Reagan's challenge to the black community," he said. "My parents were middle class, inner city Atlanta people. They were raised in the segregated South, but had a vision for their three boys...They did not sit back and wait for anyone to give them a handout, and that sentiment permeated throughout our extended family."

There are many blacks who share the sentiments of Allen West, more, I suspect, than who share those of Jeremiah Wright. But they tend to be ignored by the news media, who tend to view as "authentic" only the voices of anti-American radicals.

LtCol. West is running for Congress in Florida's 22nd district (Fort Lauderdale/Palm Beach) against Democrat Ron Klein, who upset longtime GOP incumbent Clay Shaw there in 2006. Rep. Klein is able and well funded. LtCol. West faces an uphill battle, as he did in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if he wins, he'll do more for racial healing than any speech by Barack Obama.