In your NRO interview you lamented the lack of interest in Obama and Kenya. We're very interested. Could you elaborate?
Obama’s father was a Kenyan Muslim and a communist. He was a member of the Luo tribe, whose leader, Jaramongi Oginga Odinga, was a raging communist who bitterly opposed the pro-Western, pro-American Kenyatta government. Obama’s father wrote a paper – which the press in this country refused to report about during the 2008 election – that was called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” The paper was a communist (or “scientific socialism”) critique of Kenyatta’s economic policies, placing Obama Sr. firmly in the Odinga camp. In many ways, Pres. Obama seems ambivalent about the father he hardly knew, but he has effusively praised Obama Sr.’s academic accomplishments in economics and what he euphemistically calls the “promise” his father had to fulfill to Africa. That “promise” was Marxism – that was Obama Sr.’s ideology.
Odinga’s son, Raila Odinga, is a committed communist – so much so that he named one of his sons after Fidel Castro. (One of his daughters is named after Winnie Mandela, who of course urged “necklacing” and other brutality and was convicted of kidnapping and accessory to murder.) Odinga was also complicit in a plot to overthrow Daniel arap Moi, Kenyatta’s pro-American successor, in a violent coup in 1982 – for which he spent eight years in prison. In the insidious world of African politics, this did not disqualify him for future advancement. Odinga became energy minister in 2001, which enabled him to strike very lucrative personal arrangements with Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and with Sheikh Abdukeder al-Bakari of the Al Bakari oil dynasty in Saudi Arabia. By the way, al-Bakari’s name appears on the “golden chain” list of wealthy donors to Osama bin Laden during the Afghan mujahideen’s jihad against the Soviets. (The list was seized from an al Qaeda safehouse during a 2002 raid in Sarajevo.)
Notwithstanding this history, when Raila Odinga decided to run for president in 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama – who did very little in America during his brief stint in the senate – spent six days in Kenya campaigning for and with Odinga. During their barnstorming, Obama lambasted the incumbent, pro-American government as corrupt and in need of … wait for it … Change.
It later emerged that Odinga had made a deal with Kenya’s Islamist faction (a turbulent minority) to impose sharia law and Islamic courts if he won the election. He lost the election and (surprise!) the Islamists revolted.
This plunged Kenya into chaos, with thousands displaced and many killed. Odinga capitalized on the violence, and on his close relationship with Obama, to extort the Kenyan government into creating a powerful position for him: prime minister, an office no one had held in Kenya since Kenyatta occupied it in the brief transitional phase before he became president of the new republic.
I believe this is a remarkable and frightening story. But it has gotten virtually no American media coverage.
Thanks for posting. Good interview. HOORAY Andrew McCarthy!