Further proof that purported academic and occasional hip-hop recording artist Cornel West has no intention of ever again being taken seriously.
On the weekend podcast he shares with Tavis Smiley, West talked about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which occurred 50 years ago yesterday. (Audio after the jump)
His remarks came across as intended to do nothing more than antagonize Christians (audio) --
Let us never forget the
cowardly act of American terrorism that hit this country 50 years ago this week at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Four precious and priceless little girls were killed by a bomb set by the extremist Christian terrorists known as the KKK.
Which is like saying that Nazi atrocities in Europe were committed under the command of extreme Catholic Adolf Hitler. More accurately, Hitler was nominally a Catholic, just as the KKKers responsible for the Birmingham church bombing were born into the Christian faith before proceeding to reject its actual tenets by joining the KKK.
On that horrific Sunday morning in Alabama, Christians did not stealthily plant sticks of dynamite under the steps outside 16th Street Baptist. Christians were inside the building. Four of them, the girls murdered by the blast, "were dressed in white from head to toe, as this was their day to run the main service for the adults at eleven o'clock," wrote Taylor Branch in "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963" (1988).
Mamie M. Grier, superintendent of the church's Sunday school, urged the four girls "to hurry along and then went upstairs to sit in on her own's women's Sunday-school class," Branch wrote. "They were engaged in a lively debate on the lesson topic, 'The Love That Forgives,' when a loud earthquake shook the entire church and showered the classroom with plaster and debris."
This is what Christians were doing that morning -- and they were targeted in an act of wanton barbarity that is the antithesis of Christianity.
