Post-American Presidency
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Apostasy is punishable by death in Islam. Yet there have been no calls for Obama’s death from the Islamic world. Why is this? Islam gives no free passes.
Obama’s posture on this is hard to define or understand—all the more so because this is a critical issue.
Transformational issues facing this nation and the world at large—the world at war, creeping Sharia, the perversion of the rights of free men—hang in the balance during the Obama administration as never before. The stakes could not be higher. On foreign policy, Europe has lain down. The political elites have capitulated to Islamists and to multiculturalists. Europe is committing slow cultural and demographic suicide. It seems unclear that they could hold up their end even if America did the heavy lifting. As far as Israel is concerned, Obama has already made it clear that while he is in the White House, Israel is on its own.
As Obama continues to pursue his pro-Islamic and anti-Israel policies, this will only get worse. And so his deception about his Islamic ties must be explored. The potential damage to this country is incalculable.
These are dangerous times. Those consequences are, in this post-American presidency, already becoming apparent.
OBAMA AND THE LEFT
As a young man, Barack Hussein Obama cultivated a persona, one steeped in hard-left and racial grievance mongering. At Occidental College, “to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.” So he recalled about his college years in his first autobiography, Dreams from My Father.60
Obama dived headfirst into radical chic:
We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.61
Incidentally, I can’t help but note the misspelling of Frantz Fanon’s name: no media made mention of this or any of Obama’s endless flow of gaffes during his 2008 campaign. But the misspelling was the least of it: Obama’s heralding Fanon was disturbing. Fanon was a bloodthirsty Hard Leftist. “Violence,” he proclaimed, “is man re-creating himself.” Fanon’s publisher described his book The Wretched of the Earth as “the handbook for the black revolution.” It was full of slogans exhorting readers to revolution: “Violence,” Fanon asserted in one famous formulation, “is a cleansing force.”62
Was Obama’s infatuation with Fanon part of a young man’s college pose? Not according to John C. Drew, a former political science professor and former Marxist. Drew met Obama at Occidental College, where the future president drove a BMW (paid for by whom?) and counted as his best friend another Occidental student named Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. “We all went out to dinner,” recalled Drew, “partied and drank, smoked cigarettes—and we did what young Marxists do—we basically argued politics.” Drew said that it was clear that Obama was “on our team… a blood brother… a fellow revolutionary… he was a Marxist-Leninist dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system.”
Obama thought, according to Drew, that “America was definitely the enemy, and American elites were the enemy, and whatever America was doing was definitely wrong and bad. He thought that perhaps the Soviet Union was misunderstood, and it was doing a better job for its people than most people realized.”
Obama’s doctrinaire Marxism, Drew said, was why he was able to gain the enthusiastic support and aid of other Marxists such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and the woman he replaced in the Illinois State Senate, Alice Palmer.63 And indeed, Obama’s hard-left polarizing and resentment were to remain with him. All his post-college associations only reinforced it.
At Columbia University, Obama attended Socialist Scholars Conferences (SSC), which featured guest speakers from the Communist Party USA, even more radical communists adhering to the Maoist line, radical black nationalists, and the like.64
After leaving Columbia University, Obama spent three years in Chicago. And when he left Harvard Law School, he returned to Chicago. How Obama paid for Harvard is not known. Who financed Obama’s education still remains shrouded in mystery. If he did apply for financial aid, those documents remain under seal—adding fuel to speculation that perhaps he filed for aid as a foreign student.
Unlike the majority of Harvard Law grads, Obama did not take a position with a prestigious law firm. Instead, he went back to Chicago and got a job with the Developing Communities Project (DCP) as a “community organizer.” Stanford University sociologist Thomas Sowell explains that for community organizers, “racial resentments are a stock in trade.… What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.”65
According to David Moberg, writing in The Nation in 2007, “Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing.”66 This was no surprise: Obama’s teachers, according to investigative journalist Ryan Lizza in The New Republic, “were schooled in a style of organizing devised by Saul Alinsky, the radical University of Chicago trained social scientist.”67 Alinsky was the famous communist agitator who inspired Hillary Clinton and left an enduring mark on leftist political discourse—initially only that of the totalitarian Far Left, but increasingly on the liberal mainstream as the Hard Left became ever more respectable. That drive toward the mainstream for the Hard Left reached its culmination with the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. But the victorious Left had not discarded its extreme views to become mainstream. In the age of Obama, the Hard Left was now the mainstream.
ENTERING POLITICS FROM STAGE LEFT
Obama’s hard-left connections came into play once again in 1996, when he made his first political run—for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. Alice Palmer, the outgoing state senator from Obama’s district, personally chose him as her successor. According to journalist Andrew Walden, “Palmer was an executive board member of the US Peace Council, US affiliate of the World Peace Council, a communist front group founded by Stalin in 1948 and funded by the USSR.”68
Yet Palmer was not the most radical of young Barack Obama’s Chicago associates.
In the sixties, Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were members of the Weather Underground, a communist terrorist group that planted bombs at the Pentagon, the Capitol building, and other government buildings. Ayers himself planted a bomb at a statue commemorating police casualties during the 1886 Haymarket riots in Chicago. When a bomb he was hoping to use to kill American soldiers in New Jersey exploded prematurely in a house, Ayers became for ten years a fugitive from justice, but all charges against him were dropped in 1980 when an FBI program that was investigating the Weathermen was accused of improprieties.
Ayers, however, remains unrepentant, saying in 2001: “I don’t regret setting bombs… I feel we didn’t do enough.”69
Leaving his terrorist activities behind, Ayers served his cause as part of the Left’s long march into the institutions. He became a respectable professor at the University of Chicago. One of his neighbors was an ambitious young man named Barack Hussein Obama. In 1995, Obama launched his political career with a run for the Illinois State Senate, and he began his campaign with a fundraising event at the Chicago home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.70
Later, State Senator Obama wrote a glowing endorsement of Ayers’s book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court.71 And when Obama served as board chairman of a philanthropic group known as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that group gave over $600,000 in grants to the Small Schools Workshop, an organization founded by Ayers and headed by Mike Klonsky,
leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CP-ML), a Maoist party in the United States.72
For his part, Obama was dishonest about the significance of this association, dismissing the aging terrorist as a casual acquaintance: Ayers, said Obama, was merely “a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received an official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from [sic] on a regular basis.” The terrorist attacks? “Now, Mr. Ayers is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.”
Yet records don’t justify his having been so dismissive. Ayers and Obama were also both board members of Chicago’s Wood Fund between December 1999 and December 2002. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “that board met four times a year, and members would see each other at occasional dinners the group hosted.”73
The old terrorist Bill Ayers, who just happens to live in Barack Obama’s old neighborhood, but who hardly knows the president and has had only the slightest casual contact with him over the years, visited the White House twice between January and October 2009.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited only once during that span.74
In late January 2010, the White House denied that Ayers, Wright, and Farrakhan had visited the White House:
Also, as we have previously noted, sometimes rather than providing clear information, transparency can have confusing or amusing results. Given the significant number of visitors to the White House, many visitors share the same name. Today’s release includes the names of some notable figures (for example, Louis Farrakhan and James Taylor appear in this disclosure). The well-known individuals with those names have not visited the White House, but we have included the records of the individuals that did.75
But reports that the White House visitors list featured William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were circulating as early as October 2009. And even at that time, many people claimed that these visitors were other people with the same name. Yes, if you do an Intelius search for William Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, there are a lot of them. It is easy to dismiss. But Louis Farrakhan? There aren’t too many Louis Farrakhans in America, especially with a family member by the name of Nasir Farrakhan, who is also on the visitors list. Nasir Farrakhan is Louis Farrakhan’s son. Every family member supposedly went on a “tour.” Louis Farrakhan met with “someone” in the East Room.
And remember, Obama blocked access to the visitors list.76 The White House had to be sued for the records to be released.77
JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND BARACK OBAMA
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, of which Obama was a member for twenty years, had roots in both Islam and economic radicalism: “But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity United’s guiding principles—what the church calls the ‘Black Value System’—included a ‘Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.’”78 Wright was also a close associate of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who in November 2009 offered a doggerel version of Obama’s lofty post-American internationalism: “America,” he declared, “has run out of time. It is the time of the setting of the sun on the Western world.”79
Jeremiah Wright was a committed Marxist, as he himself confirmed in an address in September 2009: “My work with liberation theology, with Latin American theologians, with the Black Theology Project and with the Cuban Council of Churches taught me 30 years ago the importance of Marx and the Marxist analysis of the social realities of the vulnerable and the oppressed who were trying desperately to break free of the political economics undergirded by this country that were choking them and cutting off any hope of a possible future where all of the people would benefit.”80
The Fight The Smears Web site says that Obama “has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ.”81 The New York Times reported in 2007 that Obama was baptized at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988.82 Details, however, are sketchy and contradictory: a year later, Newsweek stated that Obama was baptized “in the early 1990s.”83 Was Obama baptized at all? The truth of this matter is elusive. However, the positions of the Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama attended for twenty years, are not elusive in the least: black nationalism and socialism were always on the agenda—and it is significant that the Christianity preached in the Trinity United Church of Christ is a far-left variety that focuses upon few of the features of Christianity that distinguish it from Islam, or at least from the black nationalist amalgam of Islam, Christianity, and racial identity that is the hallmark of that peculiarly American brand of Islam, the Nation of Islam.
When Obama became a member of Trinity United Church in 1991, he accepted what the church calls “the Black Value System,” a race-based code of ethics that encourages black separatism, warning black Americans to shun the middle-class life as a white trap, and to patronize only black-owned businesses. As Jeremiah Wright put it, “We are an African people, and remain true to our native land, the mother continent.”84
Not to America.
Wright, of course, drew controversy during the campaign for his exaggerated race-baiting and hateful statements in support of his protégé’s presidential campaign. And Obama, after a good deal of hesitation, ultimately threw Wright under the bus for these and other statements:
The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America, no no no, not God Bless America, GOD DAMN AMERICA, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.…
Ohhh, I am so glad that I got a god who knows what it is to be a poor black man, and in a country and a culture that is controlled by and run by rich white people!
Obama’s repudiation of this race hate was welcome, albeit tardy and politically motivated. Wright’s remarks during the campaign, however, were not likely to have differed significantly in philosophy from remarks he had made over the course of twenty years—while Barack Obama sat and listened.
And there were signs that Obama did listen. Wright preached after 9/11 that America had gotten what it deserved—that the attacks were just desserts for the atomic bombs exploded in Japan: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yard. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”85
This was Obama’s spiritual adviser. The man whose sermon inspired the title of Obama’s second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope.
Asked during a visit to Japan in November 2009 whether he thought the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, Obama ducked the question. Were Wright’s condemnations of those bombings still ringing in his ears? Of course, there were plenty of other radical Leftists from whom Obama might have picked up this idea. But the coincidence was notable.86
Now it certainly seems as if Barack Obama, with his schemes to nationalize health care, the auto industry, and more, has absorbed and adopted as his own some of Wright’s principal preoccupations—and is intent on making the nation as a whole disavow the “pursuit of middleclassness.”
These are not just insignificant associations. Obama and Wright are still close; despite Obama’s public repudiation of Trinity United Church of Christ during his presidential campaign, and bitter words from Wright about the severing of their relationship, Wright has visited the White House at least once since his onetime protégé became president.87
And Wright’s race-baiting Christianity of resentment has also left its mark on Obama’s handling of racial issues as president.
OBAMA AND ODINGA
In an August 2006 campaign stop, Illinois senator Barack Obama thundered against corruption: “My own city of Chicago, Illinois, has been the home of some of the most corrupt local politics in American history over the years, from patronage machines to questionable elections.”
But he wasn’t speaking in Chicago. Barack Obama was in Kenya.
“Here in Kenya, there is a crisis,” Obama said, “a crisis that’s robbing an honest people of the opportunities they fought for.”88 Although he didn’t mention him by name, he was attacking the president of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, and appeared with Kibaki’s chief opponent, Raila Odinga. Foreshadowing his own presidential campaign slogan, Obama declared, “Kenyans are now yearning for change.”89 Alfred Mutua, a spokesman for the Kibaki government, accused Odinga of “using Senator Obama as his stooge, as his puppet.”90
Mutua was magnanimous about Obama’s apparent naïveté: “It is now clear that he was speaking out of ignorance and does not understand Kenyan politics, we earlier thought he was mature in his assessment of Kenyan and African politics. We forgive him because it is his first time in the Senate and he is yet to mature into understanding issues of foreign policy.”91
So if Obama’s grasp of Kenyan politics was weak at best, what might have moved him to campaign for Raila Odinga? Odinga and Obama’s father were both Luos from the same area of Kenya, and Odinga claimed to be Obama’s cousin; however, Obama’s uncle contradicted him, saying that there was no blood relationship between the two men.92 Blood no, but ideology yes: Obama’s support for Odinga is consistent with his other associations: Odinga is a socialist who is enough of a hard-core true believer to have named his son Fidel.93 Odinga’s history suggests that he is more of a Marxist than a social democrat: his father, longtime Kenyan opposition leader Oginga Odinga, was a communist. The East German government gave Raila Odinga a scholarship to Technical University Magdeburg, from which he graduated in 1970.94