Obama's Muslim Roots: What a difference a year makes
"Four legs good, two legs better" -- George Orwell, Animal Farm
By Andrew Walden
As Obama redefines the religious heritage of the United States he is finally becoming less dishonest about his own religious background--and his media are following in lockstep.
Speaking in Turkey, April 6, President Obama claimed: "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation." This is not new. Obama has delivered similar remarks going back to at least 2008. These are usually coupled with "we are not a (or--We are also a) Jewish nation, Muslim nation, Buddhist nation, nation of unbelievers, etc"
But in Germany June 3, as he prepared to travel to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Obama changed his meme--announcing "The US is one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”
Toby Harnden of the UK Telegraph writes:
As ABC's Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller astutely outline here, the Obama administration is embracing the new president's inner Muslim, as it were. Deputy national security adviser stated that Obama had "experienced Islam on three continents...growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father -- obviously Muslim Americans [are] a key part of Illinois and Chicago".
So that's once, twice, three times a Muslim?
Just in case the Arab world hasn't yet got this message of inbuilt tolerance, Mr Obama himself has gone a step further. In an interview with France's Canal Plus released on Tuesday evening, he suggested that the United States might be a Muslim country.
It is not only the religious heritage of the United States being redefined. In the last few days the Washington Post published a "What Obama means to American Muslims" column by Al-Husein N. Madhany, the "Muslim gateway manager" at Patheos.com. It's title: My Christian-Muslim American President.
In a piece typical of the "look how stupid they are" genre of liberal porn--except written as a Muslim--Madhany describes encounters with airline ticket clerks he claims look askance at his name. Before the election he would say: "My first name's al-Husein," I replied, winding up my wicked curveball. "You know, like Saddam Hussein." After the election he says: "My first name's al-Husein," I told him. "You know, like Barack Hussein Obama."
"A Christian man with a Muslim father and a large extended Muslim family had become the country's first African-American President. Even more significant was the fact that 68 million Americans had voted to put the "other" in the Oval Office."
On June 2 The Washington Post carried this little tidbit of wisdom: "More than any other president in a generation, Obama enjoys a reservoir of goodwill in the (Mid-East) region. His father was Muslim."
In a June 3 article The Washington Post continues prepping for Obama's big speech in Cairo: "Many of those Muslims still smolder over Iraq, Guantanamo and unflinching U.S. support of Israel, but they are hoping the son of a Kenyan Muslim who lived part of his childhood in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, can help chart a new course."
What a difference a year makes.
In a June 28, 2008 article, "An attack that came out of the Ether", Washington Post reporter Matthew Mosk attacked Hawai`i Free Press and falsely associated a 2007 article by this writer with a stupidly written email claiming that Obama's Indonesian step-father was a "radical", that Obama went to a "Wahhabi" school, and that Obama swore his oath of office on a "Kuran".
Lying through his teeth, Mosk wrote:
Andrew Walden, the founder of an alternative Hawaiian newspaper with the motto "The untold story, the unspoken opinion, the other side," published an article with many of the same false biographical details from the e-mail in the weeks before Obama announced for president -- that he was "Raised in Muslim lands and educated in Muslim schools." He said in an interview that Obama's "alliance with Islam" was "all over the Internet," a source he often considers more trustworthy than the mainstream media.
Leave aside the insulting manufactured quotes regarding the Internet. The efforts by The Washington Post and others were successful. Obama won the election. And Mosk's story is now fishwrap.
In late 2006 and early 2007 conservatives fixated on the possibility that another Clinton would take the White Hose were giving Obama a free ride. It was difficult to find a website willing to post the article. Eventually it went up on MichNews.com.
How has it held up? Twenty-nine months later months it stands as a warning--one which has been born out by Obama's course since taking office.
So here it is again:
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Obama: Secular Muslim stealth candidate favored by the corrupt?
By Andrew Walden MichNews.com Jan 19, 2007
Barack Hussein Obama is the closest Democrats can come to electing a foreign Muslim President of the United States without actually violating the constitutional requirement that American Presidents be native-born.
Obama’s nomination would follow in the footsteps of 2004 Democrat presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry, whose French-language Swiss boarding school education made him the closest thing to a European socialist able to run for President of the US without violating the constitution.
While it is tempting to dismiss Obama as a lightweight who is peaking too early in the election season, comparisons with another Democrat presidential candidate—Bill Clinton—should give pause to any who might dismiss his candidacy as a fad. These parallels include early dirty-money backing from Hawaii Democrats.
Obama, born in Honolulu in 1961, has not only a Muslim father, the late Barack Hussein Obama Sr. of Kenya, but a Muslim step-father as well. After his first father left with Obama at age two, his mother divorced and soon remarried Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil manager. Obama’s first campaign book is titled, “Dreams from My Father: A story of race and inheritance.”
Some observers will be stopped cold by Obama’s name which evokes thoughts of both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden. Obama would be the first partially Islamic-educated American President. Since he is both the son and the step-son of Muslims and partially raised as a Muslim in the eyes of some Muslims Obama may be subject to a standing order of death to any Muslims who abandons Islam as Obama formally did when he finally joined Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in the early 1990s just prior to his first political campaign.
The new family moved to Jakarta Indonesia in 1967 when Obama was six. Indonesia was still reeling from a Muslim war with the Maoists leading to the death of between 300,000 and 1 million Indonesians.
According to a March 2004 Salon.com article by Scott Turow, Obama in Jakarta spent "two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school." He was then sent back to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandmother and attend the private secular Punahou School from grade five through high school graduation.
Growing up without a father in the house is not Obama’s only Clinton common denominator. There’s drug abuse too. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes about smoking marijuana and trying cocaine during his teenage years.
Obama studied for two years at California’s Occidental College then continuing at Columbia University, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. He also studied for three years at Harvard Law School.
Occidental, Colombia and Harvard are all places where conservative students and faculty are denied academic freedom.
The New York Daily News January 14 looks at Obama’s biography:
“Obama wrote that the wealth and stark racial divisions of Manhattan in the early 1980s had a profound effect on him.
“‘I stopped getting high. I ran 3 miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry,’ he wrote....
“He went to socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn and started lecturing his relatives until they worried he'd become ‘one of those freaks you see on the streets around here.’
“He wrestled with his racial identity, and one of the casualties was his year-long relationship with a wealthy white girlfriend. ‘I pushed her away,’ he wrote.
“After graduating, he took an analyst job at Business International Corp. to pay off his loans while looking for a grass-roots organizing job. He had an office and a secretary but it bothered him to be the only black executive, he wrote, so he quit.
“Soon after, Obama lit out for a $13,000-a-year job as a community organizer in Chicago - where his destiny awaited….”
Obama’s life: Raised in Muslim lands and educated in Muslim schools, then sent to a top-notch secular private high school serving the children of Hawaii’s Democrat-controlled political and business elite. Graduating to Ivy-league US colleges run by academic leftists. The picture of the perfect secularist, as Obama himself explains:
“I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I.”
Beyond corrupt Hawaii Democrats, leftist academia and cultural secularism, Obama has another Clinton characteristic: shady land deals. A standard method for bankrolling the lifestyle of up-and-coming Democrat politicians, in Obama’s case his associate in the deal is already indicted by a federal grand jury. The December 24 ChicagoTribune documents Obama’s relationship with political fundraiser Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko and Illinois businessman Joseph Aramanda—both of whom are named in a federal investigation of bribery of Illinois state officials. Rezko was indicted by a federal grand jury in October and Aramanda is named as an un-indicted co-conspirator.
According to the Tribune, “Rezko, a real-estate and fast-food entrepreneur, has emerged as a central figure in a series of state government corruption scandals. He began cultivating a friendship with Obama around 1990, becoming a key fundraiser….
In June 2005, even as Rezko was widely reported to be under federal investigation, the Tribune reports, “Obama bought a $1.65 million South Side home on the same day that Rezko's wife purchased the adjoining garden lot for $625,000. Obama and Rezko then engaged in a series of private transactions to redivide and improve their adjoining parcels.”
Obama’s corrupt backers in Illinois’ seamy and fetid political swamps are matched only by the unsavory gaggle of politically-connected supporters assembling to back his candidacy in Hawaii. Obama’s Hawaii support comes from a group of Democrat politicos around former Governor John Waihee—considered by some the dirtiest figure in Hawaii’s very dirty politics. This is significant because Waihee and his cronies were also early money backers of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 bid for the White House.
The little-known story of Clinton’s Waihee ‘early money’ Hawaii connection is told in the 1997 PBS Frontline special “The Fixers”, a story which begins with poor Hawaii farmers being driven off their land by Honolulu police and even an SWAT team in a mid-1980s deal to build Maunawili Valley Oahu golf course deal with Japanese investors flush from the Japanese market and real estate bubble. “Fixers” (and Waihee associates) Gene and Nora Lum go from buying the entire Hawaii State legislature in order to pass a bill allowing golf courses on agricultural land to becoming ‘early money’ Clinton financial backers. They engage in a series of transactions mixing Oklahoma gas leases, Democrat connections with Asian money and the sale of political influence to facilitate other Hawaii land deals. LINK: “The Fixers” transcripts.
The story continues into the Clintons’ better-known mid-1990s Asian money scandals involving John Huang, Charlie Trieh, Johnny Chung, the Lippo Bank of Indonesia, Clinton’s Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Hillary Clinton, and 938 documented visits to the Lincoln Bedroom by hundreds of people who paid thousands for the privilege. Finally the story told in “The Fixers” ends with then-President Clinton, ten days after winning his second Presidential term, on his way to Asia stopping in Honolulu and playing golf with Waihee in the pouring rain on the Maunawili Valley Oahu course where it all started.
The ‘early money’ backing of Clinton paid off handsomely for Waihee and his cronies. Clinton in 1993 signed the so-called “Apology Resolution” in essence apologizing for the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and 1898 US annexation of Hawaii and implicitly placing Hawaii Statehood in question.
The Apology Resolution quickly became a politically correct ‘guilt’ justification for corrupt Hawaii political operators to rake in millions operating lucrative state and federally funded programs and even private companies purportedly benefiting Native Hawaiians. One deal alone, Sandwich Isles Communications, has raked in $500 million in federal funds to provide useless fiber optic connections to Hawaiian Homelands residential lots--most of which are undeveloped.
Today Hawaii’s political class is focused on passage of the so-called “Akaka Bill” a descendant of the “Apology Resolution” which would create a sovereign native Hawaiian “tribal” government—a potential source of billions for Hawaii’s venal elites. Obama has been such a strong Senatorial advocate for the Akaka Bill, he is often called “Hawaii’s third Senator.”
In addition to the Hawaii Democrat dirty money machine Obama is tied in with Goldman Sachs, investment houses specializing in highly regulated industries and many Clinton administration figures as described in the December 6 Harper’s Magazine article, “Barack Obama, Inc.”:
“He (Obama) quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation’s manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama’s top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a “leadership PAC,” a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians’ campaigns—and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.”
Goldman Sachs had substantial dealings with ex-Governor Waihee and the corrupt trustees of Hawaii’s $6 billion Bishop Estate exposed finally in the late 1990s and documented in the current Hawaii best-selling book, “Broken Trust”.
Is “Broken Trust” a thing of the past? Obama’s Hawaii steering committee taps into both Bishop Estate and the Waihee administration. As the December 13 Honolulu Advertiser explains, “Chuck Freedman, a retired vice president of corporate relations for Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) and former communications director for former Gov. John Waihee, said the committee has contacted Obama's aides and has received a positive response.” Currently three of the five Bishop Estate trustees are also board members of Hawaiian Electric. HECO monopolizes power generation and distribution in Hawaii and through a double-taxation scheme known as the General Excise Tax, supplies a large part of the State General Fund. HECO also provides many thousands of dollars of political ‘donations’ to legislative incumbents. Bishop Estate is the state’s largest private landowner. Three of the five Bishop Estate trustees are board members of HEI the parent company of HECO.
Voters rarely got the truth from Bill Clinton; will they get the straight story from Obama? Not judging by his comments to Harper’s: “Progressive candidates generally have a harder time raising money, he said, and at times some of them will ‘trim their sails’ on behalf of the people who are financing them.”
Hawaii may not amount to much in the Electoral College, but to the National Democrat Party money machine, it is a fountainhead of cash. If Waihee and his cronies could parlay their dirty land deals into the Presidency for their selected candidate in 1992, they could do it again. Barack Hussein Obama will keep his Islamic past under wraps and his radical secularist sails trimmed. He will say whatever it takes to bring in the cash and win election. His candidacy, record and corrupt connections deserve close scrutiny now, before it is too late.