"Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin, who is black, said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Day.

"Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We're not taking care of ourselves."

Nagin also promised that New Orleans will be a "chocolate" city again. Many of the city's black neighborhoods were heavily damaged by Katrina.

"It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans — the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

Nagin described an imaginary conversation with King, the late civil rights leader.

"I said, `What is it going to take for us to move on and live your dream and make it a reality?' He said, `I don't think that we need to pay attention any more as much about other folks and racists on the other side.' He said, `The thing we need to focus on as a community — black folks I'm talking about — is ourselves.'"

A day earlier, gunfire erupted at a parade to commemorate King's birthday. Three people were wounded in the daylight shooting amid a throng of mostly black spectators, but police said there were no immediate suspects or witnesses.

"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ... support your revolution," Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast

“I think that they [Bush Administration] are men who are possessed of evil.”

“I not only think that they are misguided, but I think they know exactly what they are doing, and I think that they are men who are possessed of evil.”

“Jews did have a role, some did, in the demise and brutal treatment of the Jewish people,”

“[In his Jerusalem Post interview, Belafonte also reiterated his claim that the policies of the Bush administration are] very much similar to the things that were done when Hitler was on the rise. ... that 'sometimes the Jewish people have laid claim to such a high and pure morality' that they take great exception to facts which challenge that claim, despite that theirs 'is a DNA that sits within the entire human family'.”

“a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of (Adolf Hitler's) Third Reich.”

“Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet, ... I'm always in Africa . . . And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.”

"In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and were those slaves that lived in the house. "You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master... exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. "Colin Powell's committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture."

“Katrina was not unforeseeable, ... It was the result of a political structure that abdicates its responsibility.”