Apparently no one had clued Lolo in on white guilt, middle-class guilt, and the agony of a socialist consciousness that has been raised. Obama recalled later that his mother argued with Lolo Soetoro over her refusal to go to dinner parties at the oil company. Obama describes these as dinner parties from hell, choked with crude, boorish Ugly Americans: “American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help.” Lolo asked Stanley Ann to consider “how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people.”
In response, Obama remembered, “my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout. They are not my people.”9
Yet that was far from the picture Obama painted of her as he ran for president. “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists,” said Obama during the campaign, “was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew.… She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals.”10
He said nothing about her radical leftism and Marxism.
Yet this was the milieu in which young Barack Obama grew up. This was the early air he breathed, the early intellectual food he feasted upon. He has called his mother “the dominant figure in my formative years.… The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.”11 Certainly he has maintained and strengthened associations that his mother made in those years: Morgan Reynolds, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and former chief economist for the Department of Labor, reports that “Peter Geithner oversaw the ‘microfinance’ programs developed in Indonesia by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother.”12
Barack Obama appointed Peter Geithner’s son, Timothy Geithner, secretary of the Treasury.
Once in Hawaii, Obama’s radical associations continued. He went to Sunday school at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, a highly politicized church that aligned during the 1970s with the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—a group in which a future Obama comrade played a significant role: Bill Ayers.13
FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS
In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes affectionately about “Frank,” whose full name he never gives.14 During the 2008 campaign, the Obama camp acknowledged that “Frank” was poet, journalist, and activist Frank Marshall Davis.15
Davis was yet another communist—indeed, a Communist Party member.16 According to Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party, USA magazine Political Affairs, Davis lived in the same places as Obama and his family, but not always at the same time: he “was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson.”17 (Robeson, of course, was another communist.) Once in Hawaii, Horne explained that Davis eventually “befriended another family—a Euro-American family—that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”18 Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half sister, recalled that their grandfather, Stanley Dunham, encouraged Davis and Obama to form a bond, regarding Davis as “a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African-American experience for my brother.”19
Davis was hardly a wholesome acquaintance. He wrote a pseudonymous pornographic book, Sex Rebel: Black in which he stated in an introduction that “all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences.” He said that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual,” as well as being a “voyeur and an exhibitionist” with an interest in “sado-masochism.” He mused: “I have often wished I had two penises to enjoy simultaneously the double—but different—sensations of oral and genital copulation.” In the book Davis describes how he and his wife bedded a thirteen-year-old girl named Anne. He portrayed this as a favor to the girl.20
And this pedophile and child rapist was an overwhelming and warmly remembered influence on the future post-American president.
But for Obama, of course, Davis was not an instructor in unconventional sexual practices. He seems to have instructed young Barack Obama in leftism and racial grievance mongering. Horne recalled that in Dreams from My Father, Obama “speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as ‘Frank’ as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anticommunist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation.”21
From the looks of his portrayal in Dreams from My Father, Frank Marshall Davis was a principal influence on the race-baiting and polarization that Barack Obama would make a centerpiece of his presidency. This is no surprise: Dreams from My Father is itself a political manifesto cast as a first-person narrative in order to make the ideologies of internationalism, socialism, and race hate palatable to left-leaning Americans.
OBAMA AND ISLAM
One of the most peculiar lessons of the presidential campaign of 2008 was that you could disparage someone merely by saying his name. During the campaign of 2008, to speak of Barack Obama’s Muslim roots and ties suddenly became akin to disparaging and insulting him, and engaging in bigotry and innuendo. I had written about these links early on and for doing so was called bigot, racist, and Islamophobe.
Obama went to extraordinary measures to obfuscate his Muslim background. The more proof that bloggers like me produced, the more we were marginalized. So secretive was Obama that he refused to release his long-form birth certificate, his school records, his thesis, his school records, his passport on which he traveled as a teen… the list itself was a looming red flag.
And then suddenly, after the election, in 2009, it was no longer “racism” to point out Obama’s Muslim roots. They became a point of pride for him and a centerpiece of his outreach to the Muslim world. It was a curious turnabout, and one with important implications.
ISLAMIC LAW OR A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC?
In 2008, Obama’s evident embarrassment over his early Muslim connections was a tacit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of many Americans’ concerns about Islam’s supremacist and violent elements. But his turnabout made clear that he had no such concerns himself, and would do little or nothing as president to address them.
Yet those concerns were of immense import. Islamic law and democracy, Islamic law and a free constitutional republic, are incompatible. Every precious freedom that is protected by the American rule of law is prohibited in Islam. And Islam traditionally allows for no competition. The influential twentieth-century Pakistani jihad theorist Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979) explained it forthrightly: “Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it.”
According to Maududi, at that point Sharia law will be put in their place: “The purpose of Islam is to set up a State on the basis of its own ideology and programme, regardless of which Nation assumes the role of the standard-bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic State.”22
The First Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This was one of the most masterful achievements of the Founding Fathers: providing the foundation for a society in which people may differ from one another in conscience but live together as equals without one group trying to gain hegemony over the other.
This is a far cry from the 1998 statement by Omar Ahmad, the cofounder and longtime board chairman of America’s foremost Islamic pressure group, the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR). “Islam,” said Ahmad, “isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
After he received unwelcome publicity as a result of this statement, Ahmad denied saying it, several years after the fact. However, the original reporter, Lisa Gardiner of the Fremont Argus, stands by her story. Art Moore of WorldNetDaily asked Gardiner in December 2006 about Ahmad’s statement, and reported: “Gardiner, who now works for a non-profit group, told WND last week she’s 100-percent sure Ahmad was the speaker and that he made those statements, pointing out nobody challenged the story at the time it was published eight years ago.” In response, Ahmad snapped: “She’s lying. Absolutely, she’s lying. How could you remember something from so long ago? I don’t even remember her in the audience.” But he failed to come up with any explanation of why a reporter for an obscure local paper would fabricate such an egregious falsehood about him. What’s more, CAIR’s spokesman, the acerbic and combative American convert Ibrahim Hooper, once said in a similar vein: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”23
In service of this aim, the international Islamic organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, which operates in the United States under a variety of names and organizational umbrellas, describes its own mission in this country (according to a document captured in a raid and released by law enforcement in 2007) as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”24
The goal of “God’s religion”—Islam—being made “victorious over other religions” was a political, not solely a religious one. The Islamic law that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to impose was a comprehensive system covering every aspect of society—and restricting many freedoms that Americans cherished. Chief among these was the freedom of speech: while the First Amendment protects not only the freedom of religion but also the freedom of speech and of the press, Islamic law stipulates that non-Muslims are forbidden to say “something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet… or Islam.”25
In line with this, riots broke out in several Muslim countries in 2006 over cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper. That became the impetus for an all-out effort by the fifty-seven-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, to try to compel Western nations to restrict the freedom of speech when it came to Islam—including antiterror analyses that discussed the Islamic texts and teachings that jihadists used to make recruits and justify their actions among peaceful Muslims.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the OIC (whom Obama has since had to the White House), made it clear that he was the one dictating terms: “In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film ‘Fitna’ [a film critical of Islam made by the Dutch politician Geert Wilders], we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed. As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”
The OIC’s influence is considerable. Historian Bat Ye’or explains that the OIC is “one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the Ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah—the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body. The OIC is a unique organization—one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states.”
And it is a sworn enemy of the freedom of speech. “In its efforts to defend the ‘true image’ of Islam and combat its defamation,” Bat Ye’or explains, “the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish ‘Islamophobia’ and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities.”26
The OIC had an ally in Barack Hussein Obama. As we shall see later, when he became president, Barack Obama, in a sharp departure from the policy of his predecessor, showed an eagerness not to cross those “red lines.” He even went so far as recommending criminal penalties for those who did.
Strange behavior for a man who swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States—including the freedom of speech.
Islamic law is also incompatible with the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In Islam, the idea that all are not equal, and do not share unalienable rights, arises from the sharp dichotomy between believer and unbeliever that runs through the Qur’an and the religion as a whole. A manual of Islamic law endorsed by Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the most respected and prestigious institution in Sunni Islam (which comprises 85 to 90 percent of Muslims worldwide), elaborates a system of blood money payments in restitution for a killing—but the payments are less if the victim was a woman or a non-Muslim: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.”27
Perhaps most importantly of all, the Declaration of Independence asserts that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” By contrast, in Islamic law all authority derives from Allah alone—and accordingly, non-Muslims have no right to hold political power, at any time, in any place. The internationally influential Pakistani jihad theorist Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi explained that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they did this, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”
THE HUSSEIN WARS
On February 26, 2008, Bill Cunningham, a popular radio host in Cincinnati, spoke at a rally there for Republican candidate John McCain. Cunningham referred at least three times to “Barack Hussein Obama.” McCain repudiated Cunningham and his remarks even before anyone asked him to do so.28 When asked later if using Obama’s middle name was appropriate, McCain responded, “No, it is not. Any comment that is disparaging of either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama is totally inappropriate.”29
It was “disparaging” Obama and taking the low road simply to call him by his full name? Apparently so. Leftist professor Juan Cole huffed in Salon that Obama’s name was “a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort.”30
It is worth pointing out, however, that Cunningham did not in fact speak disparagingly of Obama’s name, or denigrate it. He just used it, without explicit c
ommentary upon it. Of course, McCain, Obama, and the others who took umbrage at this usage were noting the subtext: that Obama’s middle name of Hussein, so unfortunately shared with the Iraqi dictator recently toppled by American troops, could imply to some that the Democratic candidate was not quite American, not quite as Christian as he claimed, and possibly holding loyalties to entities at war with the United States.
These implications were what made the usage so offensive—and so throughout the presidential campaign of 2008, commentators on both sides of the political divide studiously avoided even mentioning Obama’s middle name, tacitly accepting the contention that Cole articulated, that to do so would be “racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort.”
Obama himself played up this idea, suggesting in June 2008 that the Republicans would run against him by exploiting that bigotry: “The choice is clear. Most of all we can choose between hope and fear. It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”31
And in September 2008, he expanded upon this theme, telling a crowd in Pennsylvania: “I know that I’m not your typical presidential candidate and I just want to be honest with you. I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington. You know, he’s got a funny name. You know, we’re not sure about him.’ And that’s what the Republicans when they say this isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities, what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that, you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections.’… Just making stuff up.”32
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