Time for jubilation or reflection? 05/02/2011

Newscasts and the Internet are abuzz with nonstop reports on the killing of the al-Qaeda leader who long evaded intelligence agencies. Osama bin Laden’s death in Abbottabad, Pakistan Sunday has many implications. How will it impact the 2012 presidential campaign? Will it spark retaliatory attacks by bin Laden’s supporters in the United States or abroad? Does it truncate the U.S. role in Afghanistan?

As many rejoiced in New York’s Ground Zero, outside the White House in D.C. and elsewhere, several observers also noted that this occasion should also be marked with reflection, solemnity. How should people react?

The following is a roundup of reactions by different faith-based organizations and religious leaders to the end of the long manhunt for the world’s most wanted terrorist:

• “We continue to pray for those whose lives were lost on September 11, their families, and those in the Armed Forces who have sacrificed so much to bring a measure of justice to this terrible tragedy,” said the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, rector of Trinity Wall Street, in a statement posted on the church’s Website.  “Let us also reflect on the wisdom of Archbishop Desmond Tutu that justice requires reconciliation, and while we seek the end of violence, we work and pray for reconciliation and peace.”
• “Before the news last night, it was clear that Osama bin Laden was already losing. The ‘Arab Spring’ of young Arabs and Muslims through nonviolent democratic movements has been a repudiation of bin Laden and his radical terrorist agenda. The death of Osama bin Laden could be a turning point in our ability to both resist evil and seek good, to turn away from the logic of both terrorism and war, and, as the Bible says, to find the things ‘that make for peace,’” wrote  Jim Wallis, theologian and CEO at Sojourners, on a blog he maintains.
• Speaking about President Obama’s speech Sunday night, Eboo Patel wrote in a blog for the Washington Post, “He was very clearly our commander in chief – recounting how he told C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta to make the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden his top priority, getting frequent briefings on the relevant intelligence and giving the final order that authorized the fatal mission. His demeanor was focused and serious. ‘I did what had to be done,’ he seemed to be saying. Vanquishing evil is necessary but insufficient. Obama seemed most human to me, most American, most presidential, when he spoke of life, not death. He recalled America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a nation shocked and grieving, a country focused more on community than revenge.”
• “We join our fellow citizens in welcoming the announcement that Osama bin Laden has been eliminated as a threat to our nation and the world through the actions of American military personnel. As we have stated repeatedly since the 9/11 terror attacks, bin Laden never represented Muslims or Islam. In fact, in addition to the killing of thousands of Americans, he and Al Qaeda caused the deaths of countless Muslims worldwide. We also reiterate President Obama’s clear statement tonight that the United States is not at war with Islam,” according to a statement issued Monday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
• “Osama bin Laden, as we all know, bore the most serious responsibility for spreading divisions and hatred among populations, causing the deaths of innumerable people, and manipulating religions for this purpose,” said Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, according to a Catholic News Service story . “In the face of a man’s death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion  for the further growth of peace and not of hatred.”
• “Ecclesiastes expressed it best. There is not just a time to love but also a time to hate. I hate Osama bin Laden but I will not rejoice in his death. It would have been better for the world had he never been born. But once he was, and once he directed his life to unspeakable cruelty, it was necessary for him to be stopped and killed. And for that I give thanks to G-d and the brave soldiers of the American military for making the world a safer, more just, and innocent place,” wrote Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, founder of This World: The Values Network, in a column on the Huffington Post Website.
• “We did the best we could do, and that is often where we are left. We are left with a sense of sober satisfaction. This is no small comfort to all those who are still grieving — the loved ones of September 11, and the loved ones of all who lost their lives while wearing the uniform of the United States fighting bin Laden and the forces of terror. But, as is always the case, we are left with a sense that a higher court is still needed. Christians know that Osama bin Laden escaped the reach of full human justice and a trial for his crimes, but he will not escape the judgment that is to come. Bin Laden will not escape his trial before the court of God. Until then, sober satisfaction must be enough for those still in the land of the living,” wrote Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler on his blog.
• “I remember when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and some of the white people in my city danced and said, ‘good!’ We, Americans, didn’t like it when we saw people dancing in their streets when the World Trade Center buildings came down. Not even sports teams allow the winner to gloat in front of the team they’ve beat. It is behavior unbecoming to an American. It feeds those who already hate us, who think that we are arrogant and selfish and self-serving. We have a right to be happy that bin Laden is gone, but gloating is not good,” wrote the Rev. Dr. Susan K. Smith, senior pastor of Advent United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio, in a blog for the Washington Post.
• Added May 3: Everyone I know had a reaction to one man’s death. Many were gleeful singing victory or revenge, some were fearful of retaliation, some were judgmental complaining that people were rejoicing and relieved. How did u balance what you believe about God with what you felt as a witness to the gas chamber like execution of thousands of innocent people on 9-11? I won’t judge what u felt, but what did u learn? ~ Bishop T.D. Jakes, senior pastor of The Potter’s House in a message posted on the T.D. Jakes Ministries/The Potter’s House Facebook page .
• Added May 3:   Bin Laden’s death is a “huge psychological victory” according to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “It is a cause for celebration. So many people lost their lives, their family members lost their lives. It was such a traumatic blow,” Jackson said, according to a Dr. Boyce Watkins’ blog. “This might be the first real emotional venting for the pain that came from 9-11, the kind of relief that the plotter had destroyed.”  On his radio program Tuesday, Watkins interviewed the Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton, a native New Yorker, said, “Everyone died on 9-11. Blacks, whites, Muslims, Latinos and working class people,” he said. “He didn’t care who was in those buildings or on that plane. All Americans shared in that pain and all Americans can share in what we are seeing today.”

Birth certificate release stirs emotions 04/29/2011

The Rev. Jesse Jackson doubts conspiracy theorists will stop even though President Obama released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday amid questions about his citizenship.

Media and the political blogosphere buzzed as President Obama said making it public was intended to end debate. Activists, religious leaders and scholars also gave their takes on the birth certificate issue via columns, blogs, tweets and interviews.

“This is the most personal attacks on any president ever,” Jackson told Politico about rhetoric challenging the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency is really racially tinged code.

In 1984 and 1988, Jackson sought the Democratic nomination. The current political climate is very different, he said.

“Whose personal religion has ever been challenged before? That has strong racial overtones,” he said.

“Birthers don’t want to lend legitimacy to the Obama presidency. And that refusal is not about policy it is about race,” tweeted Eddie Glaude, Princeton University’s William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies Wednesday. “Obama’s birth certificate will continue to be an issue, even with this evidence, as long as the press lends this nonsense credence.”

“The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country,” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, in a statement posted on the White House Website Wednesday morning. “It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country.”

The week before Easter Donald Trump was the second leading newsmaker behind President Obama, according to news analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “registering as a dominant figure in 4 percent of all the week’s stories.”

“That is six times more attention than the next most covered potential GOP contender, Sarah Palin, generated last week,” said Project for Excellence in Journalism associate director Mark Jurkowitz, in a press release Tuesday.

The celebrity developer and possible presidential candidate’s statements helped push the 2012 race into the news. But his questions also reflect mainstream Republican belief about Obama’s birthplace, according to a New York Times-CBS News poll released April 21.

Forty five percent of Republicans and 45 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters believe he was born in another country. The poll also found that 57 percent of Americans believe he was American-born, against 25 percent who didn’t.

“The influence of racial prejudice in contemporaryU.S. society is typically manifested in subtle, indirect forms of bias. Due to prevailing norms of equality, most Whites attempt to avoid appearing biased in their evaluations of Blacks, in part because of a genuine desire to live up to their egalitarian standards, but also because of concern regarding social censure,” wrote University of Delaware doctoral student Eric Hehman in a recent study measuring prejudice and opinions of president’s “Americanness” and effectiveness.

“When commentators asked why the president had not done this sooner, I screamed back at my television: ‘Why should he have to do it at all?’ I would be surprised if you did hot hear me screaming at your house, wherever in the world you live,” wrote scholar Valerie Elverton Dixon on God’s Politics blog maintained by theologian Jim Wallis and friends.  “That the president of theUnited States had to do this was not only a national embarrassment; it was an insult to every American who voted for him, and a special offense to African Americans.”

A few minutes before the president’s news conference, Glaude tweeted, “I know this is a stretch, but it almost feels like he has been forced to show his papers proving that he’s free.”

“It is not just the birth of President Obama that is at stake. Those leading the charge for states’ rights are against the birth of EEOC,” wrote Jackson in a column  posted on Huffington Post’s Website Wednesday night. “They are against the birth of contract compliance. They are against the birth of Title IV. They are against the birth of Affirmative Action. They are against the birth of the Voting Right Act. The attack against the president is really an attack against the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Today we see leaders of this modern-day states’ rights movement trying to use their newfound power as Governor’s and state legislatures to undermine the Civil Rights gains of the 50s and 60s.”

As satirist Jonathan Swift is credited to have said, “One cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into.”

“I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,” President Obama said during a news conference Wednesday. “But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press.  We do not have time for this kind of silliness.  We’ve got better stuff to do.  I’ve got better stuff to do.  We’ve got big problems to solve.  And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them — not on this.”

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that 24 percent of Americans who suspect he was born abroad. Gallupeditor-in-chief Frank Newport said beliefs reflect a partisan connection.

He said 43 percent of Republicans believe Obama is foreign born including “including 15 percent who are definite in their beliefs and another 28 percent who say ‘probably.’”

“Of some concern to the White House and Obama’s 2012 re-election strategists is the fact that 20 percent of independents believe Obama was probably or definitely not born in the U.S. Nine percent of Democrats agree,” said Newport in a report posted on the organization’s Website.

In a Huffington Post column Thursday titled “It’s Time for Donald Trump to put up or shut up,” the Rev. Al Sharpton wrote about how the media scrutinized him when he was a 2004 presidential candidate and that it’s time for Trump to be held by the same standards. He also commented on the Rev. Franklin Graham’s statements aired on ABC’s “This Week” on Easter that raised skepticism about the president’s faith and citizenship.

“Graham not only continued to fuel the flames of ‘otherness,’ but at its very core, his statements went against all the fundamentals of Christianity itself,” Sharpton wrote. “The Bible clearly states: ‘Judge thee not.’ As a minister myself, I was deeply offended that Graham would even attempt to suggest that the president was lying about his religion, or had a different ‘definition’ of it.”

“Many on the left say that birtherism is just racism, but there’s more than simple racial animus behind it. I suspect that part of the problem is that Obama is indeed not black enough; specifically, the president is not sufficiently Negro—the historical variation of blackness that is uniquely and indisputably American,” wrote Melissa Harris-Perry for The Nation.

She writes that it’s not just about his birth.

“When birthers accuse President Obama of not having a ‘real’ birth certificate, they’re telling him to ‘go back to Africa,’” wrote the former associate professor of politics and African-American studies atPrincetonUniversitywho will teach political science and head a new program at Tulane University’s Newcomb College Institute this summer. “It’s a taunt he’s able to dismiss because he knows exactly where and when he’s from. But for black Americans descended from slaves, to question one’s birth raises perhaps a more troublesome enigma: to be born in servitude to someone, but from nowhere.”

Happy birthday, Mr. President! 08/04/2010

 

Wednesday is President Barack Obama’s 49th birthday.

‘This has been a big — and hectic — year for him. After signing the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform into law — and completing his first year as president — I think it’s safe to say we will remember it for a long time. And I know full well how much he credits this movement, and the work of supporters like you, for the change that we’ve accomplished,” said first lady Michelle Obama in an e-mail sent Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee. “So I’m putting together a birthday card  that I would like you to sign. Together with other Organizing for America supporters — and me, Malia, Sasha, and Bo — we’ll wish him a happy birthday and let him know that we’re ready to take on the year ahead alongside him.”

Across the country, Organizing for America volunteers will hold parties in honor of the 44th president.

Celebrating America’s birthday 07/04/2010

Enjoyed watching the fireworks while standing near the children’s hospital and  Howard University’s campus,  which sits high and provides a clear view of the Washington Monument. The fireworks dotted the sky around the monument and where I stood allowed me to watch and avoid the large crowds mulling about the Mall.

But, on this day, I couldn’t also help but think about what Independence Day means to me. Freedom from what? Freedom from insecurities, shackled ideas? Also, what it meant to the slaves as Fredrick Douglass illuminated eons ago? Or to individuals such as Crispus Attucks. As  syndicated columnist Juan Williams noted Sunday on Fox News Sunday, he couldn’t think of anyone “who better personified” the meaning of the observance, a former slave who was the first to die in the Revolutionary War.

I’ve always loved the ceremony around the holiday – the fireworks, getting a chance to enjoy warm weather and hearing the testimony of people who embody the hope of this country such as newly naturalized citizens and veterans. Yet, admittedly, there have been times when I was less than enthusiastic about its meaning because I knew when this nation was formed thousands of enslaved Africans in America were not included in the promise of  ”life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But that feeling has changed. I attribute it to getting older, learning more about past and current liberation movements, traveling overseas a few times and witnessing beautiful aspects of what our country has to offer including the election of President Barack Obama. Today, I think about the first family, which is also celebrating the eldest daughter’s birthday, and all the challenges they face. Also, prominent in my mind are the issues facing all Americans including recession, a war, environmental disaster and widespread apathy. So, if we take a moment to be silly, to shoot some fireworks and to reflect about the gift of living in a nation where people of various ideologies and socioeconomic backgrounds are protected by the same laws, I can cosign to that.

So, today, sporting my holiday themed baby tee from Target, I was proud to celebrate, to remember heroes and sheroes such as Attucks and Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth and Douglass. I also think about those who have served in the military including my father who retired from the Army, but continues to work at an Army medical center.

“As we celebrate the profound pride of being American, today is a time to honor the women and men in our armed forces, whose immeasurable bravery and sacrifice have made our country what it is today,” Obama said Sunday. “That sacrifice is shared with husbands and wives, with sons and daughters, with fathers and mothers, who are asked to wait at home as their loved ones protect our nation. Their heroism, too, has helped pave the path of our freedom.”

Also, I cannot help but recall the words of Langston Hughes when he noted the dual-consciousness of blacks and their place in this country in “I, too, sing, America“, one of my favorite poems.

God bless President Obama. God bless us all because we sure need it.

Call for immigration reform 07/02/2010

Reflecting about President Obama’s speech and wondering what’s the role of communities of faith and conscience in immigration reform.