No one expects the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a man of education, intellect, talent and professional and material success to commit an act of violence. I don't believe that Wright, now retired, is trying consciously to incite his admirers and former congregants to do much more than go to the polling place.
Still, it's worth noting that on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 the world heard an audio tape of Wright's diatribe against the Jews who, he seemed to be complaining, were pulling the levers in the Obama White House. In a taped interview at a ministers' conference, Wright told a reporter that he hasn't spoken to his former parishioner now President Obama because "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me.....They will not let him talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is."
Later the same day, the world saw video of something incalculably worse: the aftermath of a murder of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington, DC. Within minutes, bloggers had posted the shooter's hate language, easily accessible on his web site. Holocaust-denier James von Brunn double-parked his car, walked to the door of the museum with his .22-caliber rifle in full view and started to shoot. Before he could be stopped and wounded himself, he had his victim: Stephen T. Johns, an African American, which was, presumably, fine with von Brunn because he hated blacks almost as much as he hated Jews.
Brunn, who served six years in the 1980s for attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board, believes, apparently, that the Jews control not only the media, but also the banking system. According to the AP, he "claimed to expose a Jewish conspiracy `to destroy the White gene-pool.'"
I don't mean to compare von Bunn, who ranted "It's time to kill all the Jews," to Jeremiah Wright, who has done some good things in his career and has supporters whom I consider to be reasonable people.
But the business about the "White gene-pool" quoted above does bring to mind one of Wright's more incendiary statements -- that American officials were somehow deliberately infecting children of color with the HIV virus