Former President Barack Obama’s latest memoir, “A Promised Land,” may be selling well but it is not sitting well with pastor and activist Rev. Allan Boesak.
Considered one of South Africa’s leading spokesmen against racism, Dr. Boesak gave a scathing sermon criticizing Obama for his remarks about his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama distanced himself from his longtime pastor, Rev, Wright, during his first bid for the White House in 2008 over controversial comments by Wright about the U.S. government, white supremacy, and racism.
Wright led Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama attended services there for almost 20 years.
Boesak, a clergyman in the South African Dutch Reformed Church, questioned Obama’s motives for continuing to talk about Wright in his new book after all these years. During his sermon, Boesak asked, why “does this powerful, famous, rich, influential man not just spend time in his book on Jeremiah Wright but attack him the way that he did?”
A close friend of Wright’s, Boesak said Wright has not “uttered a harsh word against Obama.
“Meanwhile the Obamas, first Barack, then Michelle in her book, and now again Obama in (this new) book, have not stopped their attacks (against Wright),” Boesak said.
“Why would this powerful, popular ex-president, this undisputed darling of the establishment, need to include those pages in this book,” Boesak asked, before answering the question.
“The Pentagon felt the only way to change the anti-war sentiment (in the U.S. at the time) was to get Obama elected. Obama would become the new face of the empire and its wars. He would be able to make it seem benevolent and acceptable,” Boesak explained.
Once Obama was elected, he became “the perfect servant of the empire,” Boesak said.
Twitter seems to agree with Boesak.
One person tweeted, “Jeremiah Wright? Is it 2008 again? We back on this?”
Another replied and commented about Wright’s failing health since suffering a stroke in 2016. “Yes Obama felt it necessary to criticize Wright again in his new book. This even though Wright has said nothing abt Obama for 12 years and is in a wheelchair after having a stroke!”
Dr. Boesak was ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1968. From 1970 to 1976 he studied in the Netherlands and U.S. When he returned to South Africa, he became politically active against apartheid, joining the African National Congress (ANC).
After persuading members of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to declare apartheid a heresy and to suspend membership of the white South African churches in 1982, Boesak served as president of the alliance from 1982 to 1991. He was arrested several times for his participation in demonstrations and his movements and speech were restricted, according to Britannica.com.
After the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s, Boesak remained active in the ANC. However, in 1994 he was accused of misappropriating money donated to his charity, Foundation for Peace and Justice. The allegations forced him to withdraw his nomination as ambassador to the United Nations. In 1999 he was convicted of theft and fraud, serving one year of a three-year sentence before his 2001 release. He was pardoned by President Thabo Mbeki in 2005.
Wright Jr. is a pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation he led for 36 years. Its membership grew to more than 8,000 parishioners on his watch. He gained national attention in the U.S. in 2008 after ABC News investigated the sermons of Wright who was, at that time, the pastor of presidential candidate Obama.
Obama denounced the statements in question in a speech titled “A More Perfect Union,” in which he sought to place Wright’s comments in a historical and sociological context. Obama denounced Wright’s words but did not disown him as a person.
Obama spoke of Wright in an earlier book, “The Audacity of Hope.” The book’s title was inspired by a Wright sermon. He spoke of Wright again in “A Promised Land.”
Obama wrote that when he attended and joined Wright’s Trinity United Church, he felt that some of the pastor’s sermons were “a little over the top.”
“But when news coverage showed his pastor speaking of an America that believes in Black inferiority and white supremacy ‘more than we believe in God,’ Obama chose to withdraw his invitation for Wright to give the invocation as he announced his candidacy,” America Magazine reported.
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Here’s more from Obama on the subject of Wright: “I wasn’t surprised that my pastor would point out the gap between America’s professed Christian ideals and its brutal racial history,” Obama wrote in ‘A Promised Land.’ “Still, the language he’d used was more incendiary than anything I’d heard before, and although a part of me was frustrated with the constant need to soften for white folks’ benefit the blunt truths about race in this country, as a matter of practical politics I knew Axe (Obama’s nickname for his adviser David Axelrod) was right.”
Axelrod told Obama that Wright would have been the leading story on Fox News if he proceeded with the invocation.
Obama wrote he was forced to “permanently sever my relationship with (Wright) someone who had played a small but significant part in making me the man that I was.”
