The short film by Geert Wilders, “Fitna,” linked in the previous post, hardly contains anything new for people who have been following the subject matter over the last few years. That’s not to say it contains nothing new for anyone, of-course, and its utility is that in 15 minutes it succinctly says, “Murderous jihadists are invoking Islam, including and especially the words of the Qur’an, to justify their actions.” And it succinctly poses the question: “What are Muslims going to do about this?”

If past history is a guide, many Muslims are going to attack those posing the question, instead of addressing those jihadists who continually and publicly proclaim Islam as being a faith which demands brutality and murder.

In any case, for bringing the question to bear once more and in this kind of high profile manner, I think that the maker of “Fitna” is doing the world a service.

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There’s an exceptionally good essay today on Barack Obama’s much-discussed speech about race, at First Things, by Richard John Neuhaus: “The Strange Ways of Black Folk.”

“To understand all is to forgive all.” It’s a beguiling French adage, although of doubtful truth. Senator Barack Obama, we were told, has invited America to engage in a “national dialogue about race.” This morning’s paper describes the dialogue as “last week’s big story.” So quickly do national dialogues come and go. It is worth staying with this one for a while.

Obama’s Philadelphia speech in response to the furor generated by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s preaching was in many ways brilliant and admirable. [...] Is there any other national politician today capable of offering in public such a candid and personal reflection on an issue of such great moment? The question answers itself. Not wishing to invoke the ghost of Ronald Reagan, Obama partisans shy away from calling him the great communicator, but he is that.

[...]

Slavery is, politically speaking, the “original sin” of our national founding, just as Obama says. And he is surely right in forthrightly condemning the “incendiary” words of his pastor. The great offense is not in the Reverend Wright’s “God damn America.” Biblical prophets called down the judgment of God on their people. But they invoked such judgment in order to call the people to repentance. They spoke so harshly because they had such a high and loving estimate of a divine election betrayed. The Reverend Wright—in starkest contrast to, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr., whose death we mark next week—was not calling for America to live up to its high promise. He was pronouncing God’s judgment on a nation whose original and actual sins of racism are beyond compassion, repentance, or forgiveness. He apparently relishes the prospect of America’s damnation.

And he does so for reasons that are, not to put too fine a point on it, simply crazy. For instance, the claim that the government unleashed the HIV virus in order to exterminate people of color. The question inevitably asked is why Senator Obama, for fifteen or more years, attentively listened to, generously supported, and submitted his children to the ministrations of a man who espoused such odious and bizarre views. To ask the question is not to deny that, as the senator emphasized, the Reverend Wright also did and said many good things. That a peddler of hate and vile slanders is not without virtues is quite beside the point.

Perhaps the single most telling statement in the Philadelphia speech is this: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” The most reasonable interpretation of that statement, maybe the only reasonable interpretation, is that the Reverend Wright represents “the black community.” This ignores the great majority of blacks in America, who are in the working and middle classes and participate fully in the opportunities and responsibilities of the American experience.

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