Posted on 09/17/2008 5:29:18 AM PDT by markomalley
Handlers of the Democrat Convention took pains to finesse protests like those that roiled the 1968 Chicago convention, even erecting a concrete pen to hold protestors. The spectacle of agitators gone ballistic, observed Charles Hurt before the convention, could have reminded the public of Barack Obama's involvement with radicals like William Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist. "Any images," said Hurt, "reminiscent of radicalism will cement for voters the idea that Obama is a risk not worth taking."
Obama may very well succeed in convincing most Americans that he espouses their more moderate, traditional mind-set: According to a recent New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63% of those surveyed believe the nominee shares the values most Americans try to live by.
But we now inhabit an upside-down, "morally contested world," as Daniel Henninger bemoans. We can no longer naively assume even presidential candidates sign on to our historic common principles. Before entrusting our fate to any of them, it is now, more than ever, not only justified but also necessary to examine everything about them, including, perhaps most especially, whatever might shed light on their inner, core political beliefs.
Such discovery is all the more crucial in Obama's case because of his remarkable inexperience, calculated lack of a scholarly "paper trail," absence of papers from his Illinois Senate days and similar lacunae, deceptively understated or "stealth liberalism," and ill-defined rhetoric.
One blind spot in the public's understanding of Obama concerns his education, in the broad sense of the term: What might he have absorbed of his parents' outlook? What formal, including religious, instruction did he receive? Which mentors and academic associates has he chosen? To what political philosophy has he consistently been drawn? A look at this, Obama's intellectual formation and bent, shows that he has been steeped, by virtue of upbringing and personal choice, in an often extremely radical worldview. Throughout his life he has also typically chosen to consort with radicals of various stripes and gravitated toward radical causes.
Obama's history of radicalization is, of course, not absolutely predictive of a radically inclined Obama presidency, but his or any other president's habits of mind would surely inform their decisions.
Consider some of the main educational influences that came to bear on Obama as well as indications of his ideological disposition: Parental Leanings
In The Obama Nation, Jerome R. Corsi documents the intellectual journey of the candidate's Kenyan father who abandoned him and about whom he poignantly wrote in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Corsi shows how Obama Senior's leftist ideology gradually hardened into more extreme communist views, bringing him into step with (state Professors David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno) "'endogenous communitarian [Kenyan politician] Odinga Odinga'" and others who held that Kenya is "'neither African nor socialist enough.'" It would seem that Obama Senior did influence his son: In Dreams, Obama Junior speaks of his father's "strong image" which had provided him with "bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to ... ."
As for Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the candidate himself, in The Audacity of Hope, portrays her as "an unreconstructed liberal" inspired by the civil rights movement. Yet he stakes out a position different from her liberalism of a "pre-1967 vintage." He dwells instead on his fascination with "the Dionysian, up-for-grabs quality" of 1968, a time when, as Corsi notes, the "Far Left hardened" and "the civil rights and antiwar movements were both radicalized." In Dreams, Obama recalls how he "soaked in a vision of the sixties" based on events such as the rise of Huey Newton, the co-founder of the militant Black Panthers. Obama then seems to put some critical distance between himself and far left "orthodoxy" with the claim that he had begun "to reexamine" its tenets. To this day, however, there is scant evidence that any such serious reexamination has taken place.
Islamic Education
An AP photo gives tangible proof that Obama registered for elementary school as an Indonesian citizen of the Muslim faith. In an interview with WorldNetDaily, Corsi points out that this document contradicts the Obama campaign's insistence that he never received training in Islam and never lived as a Muslim, adding:
‘The most convincing evidence Obama was living in Indonesia as a Muslim, not simply registered as Muslim because his father was Muslim, comes from Obama's experience at the government-run public school at SDN 1 Menteng, Jakarta ... he received the type of Islamic instruction reserved for Muslim children in a government school system that mandated Islamic instruction at that time for all children attending public school in Indonesia.'
In The Obama Nation, Corsi further cites a Kaltim Post interview with Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers at the public school, who stated that he had been registered as a Muslim and took part actively in the Islamic religious lessons during his time at the school. "I remembered that Barry [as he was known then] studied ‘mengaji'" (recitation of the Quran), she affirmed. "To put it quite simply, ‘mengaji classes' are not something that a non-practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to," wrote the 'An American Expat in Southeast Asia' blog.
"The Obama campaign desperately wants to deny Obama was raised as a Muslim child in the four years he lived in Indonesia from age 6 to 10," Corsi avers. "These are formative years in a child's religious education."
Only time would tell how such roots and training would color a President Obama's actual Middle Eastern policy. But it is less than reassuring to learn that, as Daniel Pipes notes, the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan pronounced Obama "the hope of the entire world" and likened him to his racialized Islamic sect's founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad.
One scholar, Shireen K. Burki of the University of Mary Washington, does not share Farrakhan's elation. She views him as "bin Laden's dream candidate." Should he become U.S. commander-in-chief, she warns, al Qaeda would likely "exploit his background to argue that an apostate is leading the global war on terror ... to galvanize sympathizers into action."
It is telling that the Obama campaign chose at the convention to feature and thus politically legitimate the president of the Islamic Society of North America, Ingrid Mattson, at an "Interfaith Gathering" of Leftwing religious leaders. This decision is "profoundly disturbing," declares Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy, for ISNA is the largest and most important front organization of the American Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial Islamist revolutionary movement dedicated, in their own words, to "a grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands."
How might a President Obama, given his ties to Islam, deal with real-life Jihadists? We certainly cannot tell from his convention speech, in which he hardly mentioned terrorism and other dire threats to our national security. The public should demand to know much more about Obama's views of Islam, Islamism, and what his plans are to keep us safe.
Frank Marshall Davis, ‘Red Mentor'
Of the curriculum at Punahou Academy, the college prep school Obama attended for several years in Hawaii, we know little. But in Dreams, he describes the school as "prestigious" and, indicating a class-consciousness still much in evidence today, as "an incubator for island elites." He relates his intensifying sense of racial alienation and victimization, attempt to find solace in marijuana and cocaine, and readings of often extremist black authors.
An apparently greater intellectual influence in those years was a mysterious mentor-writer identified in Dreams only as "Frank," who counseled him over whiskey on issues relating to race, education and American values, and who read him poems. This close personal mentor has recently been identified as Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis, a key high-level operative in a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii. The CPUSA, reports Cliff Kincaid, was described in a 1956 report to the Senate as "'a Russian-inspired, Moscow-dominated, anti-American, quasi-military conspiracy against our Government, our ideals, and our freedom.'" Davis himself was the subject of an FBI investigation. So entangled was he in the CPUSA that he recruited members for the organization and had personal ties to party members such as Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges.
As related in Dreams, Davis advised Obama that "black people have a reason to hate" whites. About college Davis had this "wisdom" to confer:
You're going there to get trained ... They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s***. They'll ... tell you you're a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they'll ... let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid n*****, but you're a n***** just the same.
Moreover, Kincaid notes, one of Davis's poems was a paean to the Soviet Red Army, and another ridiculed the work of Christian missionaries.
Obama's relationship with Davis could shed light on why he dallied with socialists, anti-communists and anti-Americans during college, and in his political career in Chicago. It also raises questions about Obama's typically Leftist breast-beating in face of the recent Russian invasion of Georgia. As characterized by Commentary's Abe Greenwald:
Faced with a geopolitical challenge that demands unwavering Western fortitude and American stewardship, Barack Obama apologizes for the misuse of American strength and initiative. This speaks of a worldview in which America's faults are always kept at the fore and a national security paradigm in which the U.S. must seek to understand enemy action as a manifestation of American arrogance. This worldview leaves us dangerously ill equipped to tackle or even contain antagonists like Vladimir Putin and company.
Is it likely that Obama's worldview prompted his pusillanimous response to the Russian invasion?
The College ‘Experience'
Many contemporary Americans have, of course, been swept up in Leftwing thought and activism because of exposure to radicalized campus life. But perhaps because of an already well established "comfort zone" with radicals and leftists, Obama seems more readily than most to have fallen into step with them in his college years. In Dreams, he recalls how at Occidental College in Los Angeles, striving not to be "mistaken for a sellout," he selected his companions carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets ... we discussed neocolonialism, [revolutionary writer] Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy ... We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.
One of Obama's friends, incidentally, was "Marcus," who believed "white people don't see us as human beings."
The black nationalism of Malcolm X also attracted Obama, although he rejected this extremist ideology as impractical and ineffective. Nonetheless, it is significant that in Dreams, written, after all, when Obama was a 33-year-old lawyer, he also resentfully rejects integrationist assimilation, which he compares to gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be ... nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed ...become only so grateful to lose ourselves in ... America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're [not outraged by the indignities] ... less fortunate coloreds have to put up with ... but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary n*****.
Such harangues are not only racist, that is, bigoted against whites. They also show Obama to have been unmindful of the real meaning of assimilation and unappreciative of its immeasurable worth. Thanks to the process of assimilation - the uniting under the banner of this nation's democratic creed, laws, and ethics - millions of disparate immigrants have enjoyed unprecedented freedom and prosperity.
Interestingly enough, not only did Obama visit Pakistan during this time - a time of great turmoil, when the country was under martial law - but his mother was a frequent visitor to the country.
Having come to "understand [himself] as a black American," Obama then transferred to Columbia University in order to "test [his] commitments." In New York he continued to fixate on issues relating to race and class:
... I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America's race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia's bathrooms as well, where ...the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between n****** and k****.
Obama's absorption in "the politics of the dispossessed" characteristically led him back to socialist solutions. He attended socialist conferences at Cooper Union and worried, justifiably, about "uninhabitable tenements" and black unemployment and low-level jobs. Admirably concerned about the plight of the poor, he nevertheless showed a remarkable lack of receptivity to other than his received views. In his college years, notably, he showed no interest in how individual liberty and free markets might improve the lot of the poor.
Alinsky ‘Apprenticeship'
Fresh out of college, and with a range of work or study options before him, Obama elected to become a Left-wing community organizer in Chicago. He was hired for the job, Freddoso stresses, by persons who had actually trained under academic-turned-radical- socialist and self-described agitator Saul Alinsky. Employed to bring jobs and government benefits to needy Chicago neighborhoods, Obama would later praise this activist stint as "'the best education of his life.'"
What does an apprenticeship at the hands of Alinsky's acolytes entail? What is the Alinsky approach to organizing communities to which the young Obama was so receptive? In an interview, Corsi defines it as a "'radical revolutionist methodology of wealth redistribution, community organizing and political power building.'" He also emphasizes that Alinsky taught organizers to hide their true intentions in the words they spoke. Alinsky had learned the old communist adage that derision would cause community audiences to laugh at their opponents, rather than listen to what their opponents were saying.
Freddoso specifies that Alinsky followers were taught to churn up popular dissatisfaction, manipulate self-interest groups, appear to have integrity and not to exhibit class hated, and intimidate when necessary.
Did Obama imbibe Alinsky's lessons? Freddoso declares him akin to "other street organizers in the Alinsky mold" and cites Mike Kruglik, once also an Alinsky organizer, who declared Obama "'the undisputed master of agitation.'"
What might Obama's formation in the Alinsky mold mean in an Obama presidency? As Freddoso observes, alluding to the presidential candidate's earlier political service in Chicago: Like other Alinsky-ites, "[h]e had a narrow range of solutions to offer South Siders that matches with the rigid adherence he has shown in office to liberal ideas." And - taxpayers take note - nothing in Obama's Chicago experience disabused him of the notion "that government spending can serve as the economic keystone of a large, successful community."
‘Lying Low' at Law School and in Teaching Years
About Obama's time at Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the law review, the New York Times reports, "In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice." While his main concern continued to be social change, he learned to be politic, no doubt judging this approach most beneficial to his political future. Obama became "deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race," and, in particular, issues relating to affirmative action. He became adept at not giving away his true positions, "giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."
Later, during his years of teaching constitutional law as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago, Obama also concentrated on his political rise and kept a low profile. Although his focus remained on race, rights and gender "at a school where," the Times writes, "market-friendliness" prevailed and "economic analysis was all the rage," he did not engage in the heated debates on the campus, had few close friends except for liberal constitutional law professors, and produced no scholarship at all. Obama did not venture outside his own, pre-established, "progressive" worldview, and contact with some of the most distinguished conservative minds in the nation seems to have had no impact on him. In the words of Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague, Obama "'doesn't have the slightest idea where folks like me are coming from," was "an absentee tenant" in ideological debates, and "was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as [Lani] Guinier's writings had hurt her.'"
Did Obama's Leftist views evolve during these periods of his life? Because of his systematic avoidance of intellectually engaging, one cannot know. This habit of obfuscation does, however, cast doubt on his intellectual honesty and courage.
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
What Obama didn’t dispute in my book
Exclusive: Jerome Corsi says publication’s key points actually not contradicted
By Jerome R. Corsi
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today only, WND readers can get the No. 1 New York Times best seller “The Obama Nation” by Jerome Corsi – in hardcover, autographed by the author – for only $4.95, a $23 discount!
The Obama campaign, in its 40-page “Unfit for Publication” commentary, alleged my book, “The Obama Nation,” contains lies, but as I documented in a rebuttal published on WorldNetDaily on Sept. 7, there is no substance to the allegations.
Now the campaign has failed to respond to my rejoinder, and except for some minor changes that will be made in the next printing of the book, I assume the Obama campaign agrees that my rejoinder arguments were convincing.
Moreover, I assume the Obama campaign took its best shot with “Unfit for Publication,” refuting every point in “The Obama Nation” that the Obama campaign considered false.
The result here is the chapter-by-chapter arguments from “The Obama Nation” that were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.” Because the Obama campaign did not even attempt to refute these substantive arguments, I now assume the Obama campaign is conceding their truth.
Chapter 1: “Myths from My Father”
I consider the following arguments from “Myths from My Father,” the first chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded by “Unfit for Publication”:
Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” is a psychological autobiography that presents his life in a non-chronological fashion, invents dialogue, creates composite characters and changes the names of key people to hide their true identity from the reader. [pages 13-14]
Obama’s father was a polygamist who failed as a bureaucrat in Kenya and killed himself in the last of a series of drunk-driving incidents in Nairobi. [pages 16-21]
Obama’s father abandoned him and his mother to accept a scholarship at Harvard that would not pay his family expenses when he had an offer from the New School in New York City that would have paid for Obama Senior to bring his wife and son with him. [page 18]
The number of wives Obama Senior had, or women with whom he had children, is uncertain. [pages 26-27]
The number of half-brothers and half sisters Sen. Obama has is also uncertain.[pages 26-27]
Obama’s story that John Kennedy helped his father get to the United States to study is a lie. JFK had nothing to do with the 1959 Tom Mboya-organized “first flight” of Kenyans headed to the U.S. for study. [pages 32-33]
Obama’s story that the 1965 Selma march was responsible for his conception is also a complete fabrication. [pages 33-34]
“Unfit for Publication” also fails to challenge the discussion of Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng that Sen. Obama is “lal,” or “lost” from his African roots in the alienation he feels from being abandoned by his Kenyan father when he was yet a small child. [pages 36-37]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
(Story continues below)
Chapter 2, “Strangers in Strange Lands”
I consider the following arguments from “Strangers in Strange Lands,” the second chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was influenced by two radical teachers at Mercer High School – Val Foubert who taught English, but his texts were “cutting edge”: “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Organization Man,” “The Hidden Persuaders,” “1984;” and Jim Wichterman, who taught from “The Communist Manifesto.” [pages 42-43]
Ann Dunham repeated the pattern of failure in her first marriage to Obama’s Muslim Kenyan father, Obama Senior, in her second marriage to Obama’s Indonesian Muslim stepfather Lolo Soetoro. Both men were Third World Muslims sent to the United States to study at a time when their nations had emerging independent governments. Both men returned to their countries to fail within the government bureaucracy. Both men became alcoholics, with fatal consequences. [page 47]
Obama received Islamic instruction for at least one year at the public school in Indonesia. [pages 50-62]
The Life Magazine story Obama claimed he saw about “the black man who tried to peel off his skin” was never published in Life Magazine, as Obama had claimed. [pages 65-66]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 3, “Black Rage, Drugs, and a Communist Mentor”
I consider the following arguments from “Black Rage, Drugs, and a Communist Mentor,” the third chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
The Obama campaign has conceded for the first time that the identity of “Frank,” Obama’s mentor in his high school years, was Frank Marshall Davis, the communist poet and journalist from Chicago who retired in Hawaii.
The true identity of “Ray” is Keith Kakugawa, the high school friend who is a convicted drug felon, now living homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. [pages 74-77]
Obama was deeply influenced by Frantz Fanon, the African psychiatrist whose revolutionary writings were influential in shaping the revolutionary political left of the 1950s and 1960s. [pages 80-84]
In seeking his identity during high school, Obama was strongly influenced by reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, identifying with many of the more anti-white passages Malcolm X wrote in that book. [pages 90-91]
Obama was a heavy user of marijuana and cocaine in his high school and early college years; he drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes with Frank Marshall Davis while yet in his high school years. [pages 87-89]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 4, “Kenya, Odinga, Communism, and Islam”
I consider the following arguments from “Kenya, Odinga, Communism, and Islam,” the fourth chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
Raila Odinga is a socialist who as presidential candidate for the Orange Democratic Movement, or ODM, signed a memorandum of understanding with Sheik Abdullah Abdi, the chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, or NAMLEF, to win Muslim support in the Kenyan presidential election of December 2007. [pages 107-109]
Odinga supporters expressed their anger at losing the December 2007 election by engaging in a wave of tribal and religious violence in which machete-wielding Luo mobs killed 1,000 people and displaced approximately 350,000 more. [pages 103-107]
The post-election violence included massacres of Christians in which Luo mob supporters of Odinga damaged more than 300 churches, including burning to death 50 people who sought refuge in a Christian church in the town of Eldoret. [page 104]
Prior to the December 2007 election, U.S. political consultant Dick Morris showed up in a press conference with Raila Odinga in Kenya, announcing he was going to work on a pro bono basis for Odinga’s election as president. [pages 114-115]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 5, “The Ideology of ‘Change’”
I consider the following arguments from “The Ideology of ‘Change,’” the fifth chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign strategist, was lying when he maintained Sen. Obama and William Ayers knew one another because they live in the same neighborhood and their children attend the same school. Ayers’ children are grown adults and Obama’s children are young girls; Obama’s children and Ayers’ children never attended school together. [page 119]
In his 2001 book entitled “Fugitive Days,” Ayers openly admits his involvement in the 1970s bombings and the role he played as a radical revolutionary leader at the head of the SDS Weather Underground. [page 119]
Obama was recruited by Jerry Kellman to head the Developing Communities Project in Chicago, to be a community organizer working within the system developed by Saul Alinsky. [pages 128-130]
“Change” was a credo developed by Alinsky in his 1971 book entitled “Reveille for Radicals.” “Change,” for Alinsky, invoked radical socialism and meant the redistribution of wealth. [page 130]
Alinsky advocated creating change through a set of carefully calculated power-politics, where the ends always justified the means. [page 131]
Alinsky’s goal was to set in motion a peaceful revolution, using the ballot box, not bombs or bullets, to wrench power from the hands of capitalist elites and business leaders currently in charge. [page 131]
“Change” was Alinsky’s code word for creating a socialist revolution, even if the methodology meant radicals would cut their hair, put on business suits, and run for political office. [page 131]
Alinsky modeled Rules for Radicals after Machiavelli, also citing Lucifer as “the first radical” in one of three epigraphs with which Alinsky opens the book. [pages 133-134]
After endorsing Obama to take her Illinois state senate seat, Alice Palmer arranged a function for a few influential liberals in the district at the Hyde Park home of Weather Underground activists Ayers and Dohrn to kick-off Obama’s political campaign. [page 137]
In 1995, Bill Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $50 million grant program for the Chicago public schools. Ayers selected Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the Annenberg Challenge, a position Obama held for eight years, until 2003, a period during which Ayers remained active with the Challenge. [page 138]
Obama and Ayers both served on the board of the Woods Fund, at the time the Woods Fund made a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network (2001), followed by an additional $35,000 grant (2002). The Arab American Action Network collaborated with the American Friends Service Committee to hold an exhibition in Chicago on “Al Nakba,” translated as “The Catastrophe,” meaning 1948 and the founding of the state of Israel. [pages 140-143]
Bill Ayers was photographed in 2001 standing on the American flag; the photos were taken for an August 2001 interview with Chicago Magazine. [page 146]
Sam Graham-Felsen, one of the official bloggers for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, was a self-proclaimed student of Karl Marx when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and proudly displayed a Russian communist flag in his dorm room. [page 148]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 6, “Tony Rezko and ‘The Chicago Way’”
I consider the following arguments from “Tony Rezko and ‘The Chicago Way,’” the sixth chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
Tony Rezko, a Chicago slumlord, helped bankroll Obama in five election runs – in Obama’s successful 1996, 1998, and 2002 campaigns for the Illinois state senate, in 2000 for his unsuccessful run for the U.S. House, and in 2004 for his successful U.S. Senate campaign. [page 153]
Rezko gave Obama his first political contribution, $2,000, on July 31, 1995, when he learned Obama was going to run for Alice Palmer’s seat in the Illinois state legislature. [page 154]
Obama has known Rezko for 17 years and he relied upon Rezko to help him raise contributions for his political campaigns. [page 154]
Rezko wanted Obama to return to Chicago after he finished at Harvard so he could hire Obama in Rezmar, the name of Rezko’s community development firm. [page 156]
Between 1989 and 1998, Rezko got more than $100 million from the city, state, and federal government, plus bank loans to rehabilitate thirty buildings in Chicago. [page 160]
A Chicago Sun-Times investigation in 2007 found the following: six of the 30 Rezmar buildings were boarded up; 17 had gone into foreclosure, most after Rezmar abandoned them; an 19th property was being foreclosed on by the state after Rezmar walked away from it; hundreds of apartments were vacant, most in need of major repairs. [page 160]
Eleven of the Rezmar buildings were in the Illinois state senate district Obama represented. [page 160]
Rezko’s money today is gone and Rezko seems unable to account for what happened to the millions he had been lent or granted by the city, state, and federal governments, never mind the money from private investors and banks. [page 161]
Obama’s reputation was tarnished in Chicago, not only by his friendship with Rezko and the political contributions he took from him, but also by his involvement with the legal firm representing Rezko. [page 161]
There is no record that Illinois state senator Obama ever so much as placed a speech in the record objecting to the public-housing practices perpetrated in his district by Tony Rezko, let alone calling for investigation of Rezko and his business practices. [page 164]
The Chicago Sun-Times reported after a March 14, 2008, interview with Obama that Rezko had raised as much as an estimated $250,000 for the first three offices Obama sought, up to and including his 2004 race for the U.S. Senate. [page 170]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 7, “Meet Reverend Wright”
I consider the following arguments from “Meet Reverend Wright,” the seventh chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
Obama joined up with Rev. Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ precisely because Wright’s outspoken profession of black-liberation theology matched the radical political ideology Obama himself professed as a result of the lessons he had learned from his life experience. [page 177]
Obama may denounce Wright today because the reverend’s radically outspoken statements and outlandish behavior are politically inconvenient to Obama’s presidential run. Yet again, Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ not by accident but rather because the black-liberation theology spoke to who Obama was and what he believed was true. [page 177-178]
A core belief of black-liberation theology is that the historical Jesus Christ was black and, as such, he was oppressed by the ancient Romans, the white imperialists of their day who were then colonizing Israel. [page 178]
Black-liberation theologians see the biblical teachings of Jesus Christ as radical and revolutionary, delivering a social and political message that black people need to overthrow white imperialism in order to achieve liberation. [page 178]
Black-liberation theology teaches that African-Americans of today must worship a black Jesus and emulate his liberation teachings, this time to overthrow the oppression of the imperialist United States of America, a nation with a history of enslaving black people and colonizing them in modern ghettos of urban poverty. [page 178]
When Rev. Wright gives his sermons while dressed in African garb, he is consistent with the Afro-centric nature of black-liberation theology, just as he is when he rails against the United States as an imperialist nation that engages in unjust foreign wars while oppressing its own black citizens. [page 178]
Obama said in his autobiography that Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon both had an impact on his intellectual development, aiding him in a search for identity that Obama resolved by embracing his African-American roots. It’s clear that as a product of the radical racial politics of the 1960s and as the son of a Kenyan seeking to advance independence in Africa, Obama was intellectually and emotionally prepared to encounter and accept black-liberation theology. [page 183]
There is no definitive evidence in his life that Obama is Christian until he was nearly 30 years old and was baptized at Trinity United of Christ in Chicago. [page 187]
Rev. Wright accompanied Louis Farrakhan to Libya in 1984, where they met with Muammar Qaddafi. [page 192]
Rev. Wright continues to remain close to Farrakhan as witnessed by the Empowerment Award given Farrakhan in 2007 by Trumpet Newsmagazine, published by Trinity United Church of Chirst in Chicago. [page 194]
According to the Chicago Tribune, radical Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger gave Obama political campaign contributions of $1,500 between 1995 and 2001, including $200 in April 2001, about three months after Obama announced $225,000 in grants to programs at Father Pfleger’s Saint Sabina Church in Chicago. [pages 199-200]
In May 2008, Father Pfleger gave a sermon in Trinity United Church of Christ, in which Pfleger implied Hillary Clinton was a white supremacist who believed she would win the Democratic presidential nomination because of “white entitlement.” [pages 203-204]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 8, “The Cult of Personality”
I consider the following arguments from “The Cult of Personality,” the eighth chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
Obama’s campaign strategist David Alexrod selects clients around whom he believes he can promote a cult of personality, with an emphasis long on lofty themes pointing to the future and short on content. [page 215]
Axelrod has developed his political consulting career with a specialty in “packaging” African-American candidates to be acceptable to white voters.
Among the borrowed themes in Obama’s presidential campaign is the use of the phrase “He is the One,” which traces back to the Warner Brothers 1999 movie “The Matrix” and the character of Neo as played by Keanu Reeves. [page 229]
“Si se puede,” which translates into English as “Yes, we can” was a slogan that traces back to Cesar Chavez and his efforts to organize Hispanic farm workers in the United Farm Workers in the 1960s. [pages 229-230]
“Si, se puede” more recently became a slogan widely used by the pro-illegal immigration forces in the May Day rallies launched in major cities across the United States over the past few years. [page 230]
Obama borrows “change” from the political slogan socialist Saul Alinsky used as code words to signify his desire to cause a radical redistribution of income from the haves to the have-nots in America. [page 230]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 9, “A Far-Left Domestic Policy”
I consider the following arguments from “A Far-Left Domestic Policy,” the ninth chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
The National Abortion Rights Action League, which prefers to represent itself more euphemistically under its acronym, NARAL, gives Obama a 100 percent score on his pro-choice voting record in the U.S. Senate for 2005, 2006, and 2007. [page 239]
As a state senator in Illinois, Obama supported various gun control measures, including a ban on the sale and transfer of all forms of semi-automatic firearms, a bill limiting handgun purchases to one a month, and a bill requiring manufacturers to place child-safety locks on firearms. [page 243]
Obama intends to increase capital gains taxes, arguing that current capital gains taxes are not “fair,” even though lowering capital gains taxes have proven to stimulate investment and raise tax revenues. [pages 244-246]
Sen. Hillary Clinton has charged Sen. Obama’s proposal for universal health care will not work because his plan lacks mandates. [pages 246-250]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Chapter 10, “Obama’s Antiwar, Anti-Israel Foreign Policy”
I consider the following arguments from “Obama’s Antiwar, Anti-Israel Foreign Policy,” the 10th chapter of “The Obama Nation,” are now conceded as true by “Unfit for Publication”:
A contributor to Obama’s “no-nukes” policy is Joseph Cirincione who has been outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s attack on the alleged North Korean nuclear plant in Israel. In a September 2007 interview with National Public Radio, Cirincione argued, “certain hard-line Israelis” were using the air strike to prevent U.S.-Syrian or Israeli-Syrian dialogue. [page 264-266]
Obama promised during the CNN/YouTube primary debate in Charleston, S.C., on July 23, 2007, that he was willing to meet separately, without precondition, with enemies of the United States, including the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. [pages 272-274]
Foreign policy is Obama’s Achilles heel. McCain will succeed by pressing Obama on specifics, demanding Obama stop blaming George W. Bush for international problems that go back at least to the Clinton administration, if not farther into history. [page 279]
As the Kenyan angle is investigated and Obama’s interference to support Raila Odinga is understood, Obama may be seen to be inclined to pursue personal objectives in international relations, not necessarily objectives that derive from wide experience of a consistent concept of U.S. national security interests. [page 279]
These points were not disputed in “Unfit for Publication.”
Given the substantive issues in “The Obama Nation” that have not been refuted by the Obama campaign, the attacks against the book have been ideologically motivated.
As I pointed out in my 60-page rejoinder, even though “The Obama Nation” has been called “discredited,” the book is only discredited when the Obama campaign and its political supporters in the media appoint themselves both judge and jury.
As we have acknowledged, “The Obama Nation” contained minor mistakes typical to first editions. The Obama campaign has yet to prove a single lie in the book in that the statements and claims in the book remain factual and fully documented, as this statement and my rejoinder make clear.
Read Jerome Corsi’s full rebuttal to Obama’s “Unfit for Publication.”
Today only, get a hardcover, autographed copy of Jerome Corsi’s “The Obama Nation” for only $4.95!
If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. WINSTON CHURCHILL
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