Wright bombast

Jesus said, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles.

That's the Reverend Jeremiah Wright speaking yesterday in Washington. Biblical or not, his interpretation is based on a rather flexible interpretation of the signifier 'you' - so that it has different referents within the same sentence. The whole point about terrorism, in its accurate meaning, is that the 'you' who has it 'coming back' to them is a different 'you' from those who were doing terrorism on other people, if indeed they were doing that. This flexibility of interpretation involves treating those who were in the Twin Towers on 9/11, or who were blown up on the London Underground on 7/7, as if they were culpable for some previous act of terrorism, which is, in general, false. Not only is Wright rather selective in what he takes from the Bible, since somewhere in it there will be an injunction against killing the innocent, he himself is innocent of the understanding that guilt is not acquired simply through community membership, much less by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.