Bill Moyers' Friday interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. was an enlightening hour that demonstrated both the noncontextual nature of at least one of the condemned video clips and that Rev. Wright does not understand the nature of the terrorist threat posed by al Qaeda.
A disquisition of a Wright sermon is only of interest because of the relationship of Barack Obama to his former pastor, the major role Wright played in Obama's life, and because Wright 's ideas and statements will play a role in the Republican (and section 527 group) depiction of Obama in the general election should Obama be the Democratic nominee for President this year.
The noncontextual quotation condemned by Obama in his Philadelphia speech, following on similar condemnations by others, is Wright's statement that the September 11, 2001 terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center is a case of the "chickens coming home to roost."
Critics condemned this Wright statement because the widely circulated clip suggests that the 9/11 tragedy was deserved.
In fact, the quotation comes in the middle of a Wright sermon delivered at his Chicago church shortly after 9/11 in which Wright analyzes the tragedy in relation to the rarely quoted last four lines of Psalm 137.
Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon") is an eloquent and touching depiction of the suffering felt by the Hebrews in exile in Babylonia in the sixth to fifth centuries B.C., called a "hymn of national mourning" by one commentator. The psalmist notes the refusal of the captives to play music for their captors as a "song of the Lord on alien soil" that would be an unacceptable denial of their origins and ethnicity. "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither..." the psalmist cries out.
The last four graphic lines of Psalm 137 used by Wright are:
a blessing on him who repays you [Babylonia] in kind what you have inflicted on us;
a blessing on him who seizes your babies
and dashes them against the rocks.
In the sermon, after describing the 9/11 attack as an "unspeakable act" that he witnessed from a Newark hotel room, Wright turns to the quoted portion of Psalm 137. He argues that 9/11 is an example of the revenge the Hebrews considered wreaking on innocent children to be thrown "against the rocks" and murdered.
Citing several instances of "terrorist" acts perpetrated or aided by the United States including the obliteration of native American tribes, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Palestinians and others "without blinking an eye," Wright argues that the 9/11 attack was a slaughter of innocents similar to the murders of their captors' children considered a "blessing" by the Hebrews in Psalm 137. Thus, because violence begets violence, Wright thunders to his congregation that 9/11 was a case of the "chickens coming home to roost" and receives loud cries of approval from the assembled congregants.
The problem with Wright's use of the Psalm 137 quotation to explain the motivation of the 9/11 murderers is that it is just plain wrong.
The 9/11 killers were not captives seeking to hurt their captors as the Psalm 137 Hebrews were and their behavior has nothing to do with the "in kind" paybacks the psalmist describes.
The World Trade Center criminals were acting to achieve the hegemony of Islam over those who their psychotic interpretation of the Koran made infidels ripe for destruction, part of a nation and a system that was to be destroyed because al qaeda disagrees with it. Thus, since neither the United States nor those at the World Trade Center were al qaeda's captors nor was al qaeda or Islam a captive of either, Psalm 137's mention of Hebrew captives invoking a "blessing on him who repays" their captors by killing their children, and its use in the Wright sermon was, to say the least, inept.
If Rev. Wright thinks that 9/11 is a case of the "chickens coming home to roost," his position finds no support in Psalm 137. The desire of an innocent prisoner to lash out at his jailer's progeny is far different than the desire to take over the world for Islam that animated al qaeda's murderous conduct on September 11, 2001 and that animates it today.