Daniel Pipes
March 14, 2008
We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards." Wright concluded that "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
RSN Link to You Tube video of Barack's Pastor, his "mentor"?
That last phrase has a history.
On Dec. 1, 1963, immediately after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X responded to that event with the comment that, "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad," prompting the audience, according to a newspaper account, "to loud applause and laughter." When, shortly after, Malcolm X explained his comment in an interview with Louis Lomax, his views closely anticipated Wright's:
I meant that the death of Kennedy was the result of a long line of violent acts, the culmination of hate and suspicion and doubt in this country. You see, Lomax, this country has allowed white people to kill and brutalize those they don't like. The assassination of Kennedy is a result of that way of life and thinking. The chickens came home to roost; that's all there is to it. Americaat the death of the Presidentjust reaped what it had been sowing. Malcolm X
Malcolm X's remark featured the next day in the New York Times ("MALCOLM X SCORES U.S. AND KENNEDY; Likens Slaying to Chickens Coming Home to Roost'") and led not just to his being silenced by Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, but it contributed to Malcolm X being thrown out of the Nation of Islam altogether, and then to his becoming a normative Muslim. Through the decades, "chickens coming home to roost" became one of his most famous remarks; it featured prominently, for example, in the 1992 Spike Lee movie, Malcolm X.
Comments: (1) There can be no doubt that Wright knows of the Malcolm X statement and, conscious or not, forty-five years later, chose to echo, repeat, and confirm it in the context of another new American tragedy. (2) In 1963, Malcolm X denigrated the president; in 2008, Jeremiah Wright is closely tied to a presidential candidate not a sign of progress. (March 13, 2008)
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Published with Permission from Daniel Pipes: Source
