Post-American Presidency (10 page)

However, the original statement—“Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ”—still appears, also as of July 2009, on a page on the BarackObama.com Web site.
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The deceptions didn’t stop there.

OBAMA’S GRANDMOTHER: A CHRISTIAN IN 2008, A MUSLIM IN 2009

Sarah Hussein Obama, eighty-six, Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandmother, was angry. In March 2008, when asked about the rumors that her illustrious grandson was or had been a Muslim, she replied: “Untruths are told that don’t have anything to do with what Barack is about. I am very against it.” A photo was circulating of Obama in Muslim garb, and his grandmother was fuming. “Bringing such pictures that are trying to imply that not only is he a foreigner, he is a Muslim, is wrong, because that is not what he is.” But wasn’t the candidate’s father a Muslim? That didn’t matter, said Sarah Obama: “In the world of today, children have different religions from their parents.” The Associated Press added: “She, too, is a Christian.”
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Yet in May 2009, the
Daily Times
of Pakistan reported that Sarah Obama would “perform haj this year along with her son Syed Obama, a private TV channel reported on Saturday.… The channel said performing haj is one of the most desired wishes of the US president’s grandmother.”
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The haj is the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are obliged to make at least once in their lives if they are able. Non-Muslims are not permitted to make the haj or even to enter Mecca, the site of the pilgrimage and the holiest city in Islam. The highway in Saudi Arabia that leads to Mecca even has an exit labeled: “Non-Muslims must exit here.” Thus Sarah Obama’s performance of the haj means that she must be a Muslim, and that she was actually a Muslim in March 2008 (just when the presidential race was heating up) when the AP reported that she was a Christian—unless we are expected to believe that this octogenarian woman converted to Islam between March 2008 and May 2009 without attracting any attention from the international media.

Why was Obama’s grandmother represented as a Christian when she wasn’t? Who was responsible for the deception? Why didn’t the Obama campaign, in the interests of openness and full disclosure, correct the false report about the candidate’s grandmother when it circulated around the world?

And why wasn’t anyone in the mainstream media asking such questions?

Nor did Obama’s Muslim connections—connections he denied having while he was on the campaign trail—end even there.

Investor’s Business Daily
reported in January 2008 that one of Obama’s half brothers, Abongo “Roy” Obama, who lives in Kenya and now goes by the name Malik, “is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must ‘liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture.’ He urges his younger brother to embrace his African heritage.”
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WHY IT MATTERS

In October 2008, former secretary of state Colin Powell expressed the mainstream view when he said on
Meet the Press
: “I’m also troubled by not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”
⁵⁷

Powell was assuming, however, that if Obama had a Muslim identity, or identified with Muslims or Islam in anyway, that this was of no greater significance than if he identified with Baptists or Methodists. Powell appeared unaware that Islam has since its inception had a political and expansionist character, and that that would mean that ties to Islam had a greater significance than simply allegiance to this or that religious group.

And Obama himself, with his Muslim father and stepfather and Muslim upbringing in Indonesia, knows the stakes involved.

It is impossible in our post-9/11 world to be a leader and not know what Islam means, or at the very least know the hell being wreaked upon the free and not-so-free world by the warriors of Islamic jihad. And Obama has already told us which side he will be on when the lines are fully drawn: “In the wake of 9/11,” he wrote in
The Audacity of Hope,
“my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI
questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
⁵⁸

In the first year of his presidency, he showed in numerous ways that he would indeed stand with them.

It must also be noted that Islamic anti-Semitism is part of the Qur’anic imperative. The pervasive influence of Islamic Jew-hatred cannot be ignored when assessing the impact of Barack Obama’s early life experiences upon the later trajectory of his career. If a devout Muslim prays the obligatory five daily prayers, he will repeat the Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur’an, seventeen times; that chapter concludes with prayers that Muslims generally understand as asking Allah not to make the believer like the Jews (“those who have earned Allah’s anger”) or the Christians (“those who have gone astray”).
⁵⁹
The prayers generally conclude with the
dua qunoot
, a prayer that Allah’s wrath would overtake infidels.

Imagine the influence that all this—inculcating contempt for Jews and Christians seventeen times a day—might have on a young mind and a future president. Troubling psychological wiring might have been set in place for a lifetime.

Yet Obama has never spoken about the influence his early experiences with Islam had upon his mind and heart—in sharp contrast to others who were raised in Islam and left the faith. Obama would have had to make a decision to reject Islam.

If so, when did he make that decision? How?

Muslims who have left Islam are generally vocal about why they left: Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, and
others have spoken out fearlessly on these issues. Obama may not wish to engage in critiques of Islam, but if he left Islam, he must have very definite thoughts about it. And even if this is simply not an important issue to him, then he can still appreciate how important it is—knowing what he knows about Islam and apostasy.

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
.
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Obama dived headfirst into radical chic:

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Yet Palmer was not the most radical of young Barack Obama’s Chicago associates.