Post-American Presidency

by Spencer, Robert; Geller, Pamela

  Odinga also had troubling ties to Islamic hard-liners, although the exact nature of those ties was hotly disputed. Odinga reportedly made a fortune in the oil industry by making a deal with the Al-Bakri Group of Saudi Arabia; Abdulkader al-Bakri, the CEO of the Al-Bakri Group, has been identified as a sponsor of Al-Qaeda.95 Odinga also cultivated ties with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.96

  Odinga campaigned against the Kibaki government’s cooperation with the U.S. war on terror, making an issue out of the extradition of a group of accused Al-Qaeda operatives, some of whom the Odinga camp maintained were innocent. “Our government will not be held at ransom to extradite Muslims to foreign lands,” thundered Odinga at a campaign rally.97 And with Muslim Kenyans, the message resonated: “Islamic outrage,” observed Joshua Hammer of The New York Times, “had placed the incumbent, Kibaki, on the defensive and provided Raila Odinga with a tool to rally the support of Kenya’s Muslims.”98

  Nor was that all. Just a month before the December 27 election, controversy broke out over a Memorandum of Understanding that Odinga had purportedly signed on August 29, 2007, with Sheikh Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF), an umbrella organization comprised of the nation’s principal Islamic groups.99 The memorandum had Odinga promising “within six months” to “rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Sharia as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Qur’an for Muslim declared regions.”100 Odinga, according to the memorandum, would recognize “Islam as the only true religion” and give Islamic leaders an “oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions.” Christian preaching, alcohol, and pork would be banned.101

  Darara Gubo, the regional manager for Africa of International Christian Concern, denounced the agreement for undermining “the secular nature of Kenya and open[ing] a Pandora’s box of chaos and conflict similar to what happened in Nigeria and Sudan.” Gubo added: “This is not a stand-alone incident; rather, it is part of strategy to Islamize Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa, through the introduction of Sharia law.”102

  Odinga denounced the leaked memorandum as a forgery, and the next day released what he said was the genuine Memorandum of Understanding that he really had signed with Abdi—a substantially more innocuous document that Odinga termed “very innocent.”103 Abdi sought to reassure the public: “The objective was to safeguard the interests of a section of the Kenyan community (Muslims) that has undergone atrocities over the last 44 years. Fears that Muslims want to introduce Sharia law and make Islam the supreme religion in this country are false and only meant to generate hostility between us and our Christian and Hindu brothers. Islam does not suppress other religions.”104

  Not everyone was mollified, however. The human-rights group International Christian Concern, which monitors persecution of Christians worldwide, concluded that the pro-Sharia version of the memorandum was in fact not a forgery at all, but an authentic secret agreement made between Abdi and Odinga.105 The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya said that in both versions of the memorandum Odinga “comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law.”106

  Whatever the truth of the matter, Kenyan Christians remained concerned that with Odinga would come Sharia, with its institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims—but ultimately there proved to be no way to tell whether their fears were justified. For despite Barack Obama’s help, Odinga lost the Kenyan presidential election—and then the violence began.

  Amid widespread charges that Kibaki had stolen the election, Odinga supporters staged bloody reprisals, killing 700 and displacing 250,000 within a month after the election.107 By the middle of February 2008, just over six weeks after the election, the death toll had risen to 1,500, with 500,000 homeless.108 Two hundred people were burned alive when Odinga supporters torched a church in which they had taken refuge.109

  A Human Rights Watch report stated that “several leaders involved in anti-Kikuyu violence” had said that “they were merely doing by force what they had been denied a chance to do through the ballot box.” A Kenyan tribal elder said that the Odinga camp planned the unrest beforehand: “[The elders] said that if there is any sign that Kibaki is winning, then the war should break [sic]. They were coaching the young people how to go on the war [sic].”110 Stanley Kamau, who campaigned for Kibaki, declared: “It was definitely as if it had all been planned. Before the elections they (the Luos) said: ‘It is our turn.’ They told us no matter what, they were going to take power.”111

  Barack Obama was so concerned about the violence in Kenya that he took time out of his hectic schedule during the New Hampshire primary to call… Raila Odinga.112 Twice.113 Time reported in January 2008 that “in the days since his Iowa victory, Obama has had near daily conversations with the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, Michael Ranneberger, or with Kenya’s opposition leader, Raila Odinga. Obama was trying to reach Kibaki as well.”114

  Kibaki doesn’t seem to have taken Obama’s calls, but in an attempt to quell the rioting and murder, Kibaki named Odinga prime minister—in which role Odinga realized a long-standing dream of his friend, supporter, and possible relative Barack Obama: in February 2009, he met with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.115

  Ayers, Wright, Odinga—communists, socialists, race baiters. All the people close to Barack Hussein Obama throughout his life and into his presidency seemed to be cut from the same ideological cloth. As was, of course, their star-crossed friend who became the 44th president of the United States.

  THREE

  OBAMA AND JEWS

  BARACK OBAMA IS THE MOST ANTI-ISRAEL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES SINCE THE STATE OF ISRAEL WAS FORMED, YET AMERICAN Jews voted in large numbers for him.

  After Obama gave his first speech to the United Nations, former UN ambassador John Bolton on The Glenn Beck Program lamented that “this is the most radical anti-Israel speech I can recall any president making… I have to say I was very shaken by this speech.”

  Yet even after he became president, many continued to support and defend him with Stockholm syndrome–like fervor. Even as he betrayed his pro-Israel supporters and sold Israel down the river, they continued to love him. He assuaged their liberal guilt. He made them feel as if they were right-thinking, high-minded, and free of racism and bigotry.

  They loved him—even as he worked for the destruction of Israel, even as he grew more hostile toward Israel as his first year in office drew to its close. The Israeli pundit Caroline Glick described Obama’s hostility toward Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in November 2009 as “breathtaking.” Glick noted that “it isn’t every day that you can see an American President leaving the Prime Minister of an allied government twisting in the wind for weeks before deciding to grant him an audience at the White House.”

  But it wasn’t just the wait. Glick reported that Netanyahu was “brought into the White House in an unmarked van in the middle of the night rather than greeted like a friend at the front door”; was “forbidden to have his picture taken with the President”; was “forced to leave the White House alone, through a side exit”; and finally, was “ordered to keep the contents of his meeting with the President secret.”1

  The oddest and most puzzling thing about it all was that the American Jews who voted so overwhelmingly for Obama could have seen it coming all along. It never dawned on Jews, Christians, or Americans that a presidential candidate would be so patently dishonest. But he was more than just a skillful dancer. In hindsight, Barack Hussein Obama turns out to have been a bald-faced liar.

  Yet those of us who were aware of Obama’s troubling past met his newly minted pro-Israel sentiments with grave skepticism. Sarah Silverman and the other pro-Obama Jews should have been aware, for example, of a March 2007 account by the pro-Palestinian blogger Ali Abunimah at a Web site called The Electronic Intifada. Abunimah
alleged that Obama adopted a pro-Israel position as a matter of political expediency as his national aspirations developed. “The last time I spoke to Obama,” Abunimah recalled, “was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.”

  When Abunimah greeted him, Obama “responded warmly,” and volunteered an apology for not being more outspoken against Israel: “Hey,” said the candidate to Abunimah, “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” Abunimah added: “He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, ‘Keep up the good work!’”2

  As the various Democratic rivals for the 2008 presidential nomination competed for Jewish support, major pro-Israel donors should have seen Abunimah’s account. A false supporter for Israel was the last thing the free world needed in the fight against the global jihad. But his ruse was dazzling the eyes of men who should have seen clearly.

  Abunimah’s piece—and Obama’s anti-Semitic associations—got little attention. The Jewish people and lovers of our most important strategic ally missed a big opportunity. But it wasn’t just Abunimah. Voters had only to scratch the surface and look into his background to see through Barack Obama’s deception—and find not one, not two, not three, but numerous associations with virulent anti-Semites and haters of Israel. (I reject the leftist/Islamic supremacist claim that one can be anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic. The two are essentially related and inseparable; in fact, the claim that they can be separated is part of the modern anti-Semitic narrative.) Throughout his life Barack Obama has been close friends with numerous virulent anti-Semites: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Khalid al-Mansour, Rashid Khalidi, and others.

  It may be an old cliché, but it’s true: show me your friends, and I’ll show you who and what you are.

  American Jews should have noted this, and noted it well. Instead, they fell for Obama’s smooth talk at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). One speech became the litmus test. And a lifetime of anti-Semitic associations, alliances, mentors, and troubling actions were summarily dismissed.

  The mainstream media, of course, took little notice, either.

  BILL AYERS: ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND

  Obama’s association with Ayers became well-known during the campaign of 2008, although predictably enough, the real background of it never got a great deal of attention from the mainstream media. What was not as well-known as their Weathermen activities was Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s virulent anti-Semitism in the 1960s and 1970s—including the hatred for Jews and Israel expressed in Ayers’s 1974 book Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism—the “Political Statement of the Weather Underground,” which he coauthored with Dohrn.

  The book’s dedication page lists numerous “victims of imperialism,” including Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 because of Kennedy’s support for the State of Israel. RFK’s murder is thought to have been the first “Palestinian” terrorist attack in the United States of America. In Prairie Fire itself, Ayers and Dohrn characterize Israel as an “expansionist power, based on Zionist colonialism.” They assert that “from its inception, Zionism has been an imperial ideology, presented as an alternative to communism,” and claims that “the Zionist state is clearly the aggressor, the source of violence and war in the Mideast, the occupier of stolen lands.… It is racist and expansionist—the enemy of the Palestinians, the Arab people, and the Jewish people.”

  Ayers and Dohrn end their condemnation of Israel with a ringing peroration: “The U.S. people have been seriously deceived about the Palestinians and Israel.… SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE! U.S. OUT OF THE MIDEAST! END AID TO ISRAEL!”3

  WRIGHT AND FARRAKHAN

  During the campaign, when unwelcome attention began to focus on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his anti-American and anti-Semitic statements at the Trinity United Church of Christ, a church Obama faithfully attended for twenty years, the candidate claimed not to have heard or approved of the offending statements.

  That’s hard to believe. Twenty years is a long time to sit regularly in a pew, listening to a man preach, and never hear anything he says.

  Wright married Barack and Michelle Obama and baptized his children. Obama’s children attended school in Wright’s church of hate.

  On one occasion Wright was railing against Israel and then stopped himself, saying: “I said that dirty word again, Israel.”4

  The New Republic reported in March 2007 that Wright was “a former Muslim and black nationalist.”5 The Christianity preached in the 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 the racial anger that is the hallmark of that peculiarly American brand of Islam, the Nation of Islam.

  Wright defended the church’s award to Farrakhan by saying: “When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens. Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen.… His depth of analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest. Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience. His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation’s most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.”6

  The church’s Trumpet Newsmagazine said that Farrakhan “truly epitomized greatness.”7

  In an infamous March 1984 radio broadcast, Farrakhan said: “Hitler was a very great man. He wasn’t great for me as a black person but he was a very great German.… He rose Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there’s a similarity in that we are raising our people up from nothing.” Three months after that he embroidered on this, saying that “Hitler was great, but wickedly great,” and that he had made a deal with Zionist Jews that allowed them to “take the land away from the Palestinian people.” Judaism, said Farrakhan, was a “gutter religion.” Israel was the product of the Jews’ “old naked scheming, plotting and planning against the lives of a people there in Palestine,” and the ultimate result of all that scheming would be that America, as Israel’s ally, would be “drawn into the heat of the third world war, which is called Armageddon.”8

  Farrakhan has also referred to “satanic Jews,” and has railed against “these false Jews” who “promote the filth of Hollywood.” He has repeatedly denounced “the wicked Jews,” echoing mainstream Islamic theology by asserting that the “Koran says that the Jews have altered the word of God out of its place. They did not want the masters of the people to know what Jesus really said, what Moses really said, because then you wouldn’t have a yardstick to measure their deviations.”9

  Of course, Farrakhan has disclaimed anti-Semitism: “You say I hate Jews. I don’t hate the Jewish people, I never have. But there [are] some things I don’t like. ‘What is it you don’t like, Farrakhan?’ I don’t like the way you leech on us. See a leech is somebody that sucks your blood, takes from you and don’t give you a damn thing. See, I don’t like that kind of arrangement.” He has called Jews “the greatest controllers of Black minds, Black intelligence,” and has warned them that “Allah will punish you. You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell. But I warn you in the name of Allah, you would be wise t
o leave me alone. But if you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you.”

  “As I said over 20 years ago,” Farrakhan said in 2008, “there will be no peace for Israel, because there can be no peace as long as that peace is based on lying, stealing, murder, and using God’s name to shield a wicked, unjust practice that is not in harmony with the Will of God.”10

  Wright copublished a book defending Farrakhan’s Million Man March, When Black Men Stand Up for God: Reflections on the Million Man March. In it, Wright continues to defend Farrakhan, saying that “The enemy is not white people, but white supremacy. The enemy isn’t Farrakhan. The enemy is still white supremacy.”11

  Wright’s association with Farrakhan is long-standing. In April 2008, when he appeared at the National Press Club in order to address the controversy that had engulfed the Obama campaign because of his incendiary anti-American remarks from the pulpit, his security detail was made of members of the Nation of Islam.12 He and Farrakhan even once traveled to Libya to confer with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi—as Wright recalled during the 2008 campaign: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit [Gaddafi] with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”13

  Surprisingly, it didn’t, but Wright had good reason to suspect that it might. Wright’s anti-Semitism matches Farrakhan’s, as is clear from his “War on Iraq IQ Test,” which purported to answer the question, “Do you know enough to justify going to war with Iraq?” It was clear from Wright’s questions and answers that he believed that the Iraq venture was all about protecting Israel—and that Wright’s slant was all about demonizing Israel:

  41. Q: How many UN resolutions did Israel violate by 1992?